 1, 2, 3. 1, 2, 3. David Arthys, he's joining us from the UK. He's EMS support lead for WordPress VIP, which is part of automatic. He's got 30 years of support for media instead. I asked, what's the things that plugin developers do that you wish they'd stop? I got overwhelmed with one answer. So, in the end, I started asking people, what's the one thing that you wish they'd avoid that isn't this one thing? So, my number one, the first thing up here, is that thing that I told people to stop talking about. Somebody voiced the exact same frustrations with a very similar looking dashboard. And this is what we hear from users. Now, this next one, I think is particularly good. Thank you for that answer. I'm guilty of making another settings menu that says site settings as well. I've done that before. Don't do that. That's very bad. Do we have any questions from the floor for David? Hang on. Oh, around the promotional side, I think is probably long. Just to talk about that alone would probably longer than this talk could be anyway. It's a complicated question. But what I think I'm asking more for today is people to think about it when they're doing these things. You know, as I said, that setting screen where you're only going to use it once and admin is just going to use it once, what was the point in all of that advertising, all of that clutter on that screen? For me it was pointless. I don't think that served any purpose. Some of the banner advertising, that one which decided duplicate itself three times, what's the point there? Why did they not think that only do that the once? It's a duplicate of the same thing. It's just about thinking about how much of an impact that's having on the user experience and just making it a bit better. If there's one thing I can ask from all this today, we're not going to resolve all of this, but we can make it a little bit better than it is right now and just give users, particularly the less experienced users, a slightly better experience than they get right now. Thanks for the question. I seem to remember seeing something on track about a feature notification plug-in to clear up admin notifications. I don't know if that's still... Things to be aware of. We've got a WP Connect session at half past 11. That's at the Trianty balcony on level one. It's how to pitch your ideas to someone. It will be a company, client, or sponsor. That's with Morton and Miriam. I've also got the first question of the day for the WordCamp game cards. So you should have set four postcards in your swag bag if you've picked it up. You can mingle the second session of the day. I'm your host, Matt. Please don't throw anything. We'll all be fine. 50-minute talk with 15 minutes of Q&A afterwards. I want to thank you very much for coming along to this talk. We had a secret volunteer vote last night, and track three was voted the best track. So you've chosen very wisely. Thank you for coming. Just a couple of general reminders. If you haven't picked up your swag from the... Excuse me, swag table yet. That's at the info desk in the centre of the expo area. We've got a community booth there as well. We can discover how to get involved because WordPress is all about community. It's all about everyone here pitching in and helping. We've got a contributing area on level one in the Triante balcony as well. And if you haven't yet, please go and see our sponsors. Financially, they're the way in which we can make WordCamps happen and keep the cost down. So please go and see them. Fill your bags with all their swag and then go and see some more speakers. One more thing is just to remind you to have a look at the code of conduct if you haven't had a chance already, but basically boils down to be kind to one another. So we are on to our second talk of the day in this room. Aaron Ryman is going to talk us through where did we come from. And I'll just like, as an aside, I got to see Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little on stage recently and they both said, you know, WordPress just started with one comment and then one commit and it's gone from there to here. So you never know what one comment is going to start. So Aaron's joining us from the US today and he's going to take us through our roots, excuse me, as an open source project with a history of WordPress. So please welcome to the stage Aaron Ryman. Hello, hello. Can you guys hear me? You guys can hear me? Oh, there we go. All right. Thank you. I'm probably going to forget I put this here. Anyway, all right. Thank you for the opportunity to come here and speak. It's been an exhausting couple of days in Athens. I brought my eldest daughter with me and we already did a lot of sightseeing. Gorgeous city. And I set a new record on my Fitbit, 30,000 steps in one day. So I'm exhausted. Oh, clapping. Thank you. So I'm from the US, from Atlanta, Georgia. I've been married for 24 years and my wife and I have four kids. Like I said, I've got my oldest here, Lily. And I've been using WordPress full time since 2008. I tinkered with it in 2005 because I needed a blog, so it was a good fit. I run an agency called Clockwork WP and we build basically marketing websites and we have three developers, two designers and a project manager that is running the show very well where I can travel and take some time off and come here. So it's pretty awesome. I'm also an organizer for WordCamp Atlanta. We have WordCamp Atlanta coming October, I think it's October 14th and 15th. So if you want to come to the US, you are welcome. All right, setting the scene here. How many of you guys were guides, gals, whatnot? How many of you guys were developers in the year 2000, building websites? We've got a few. So a few of you are going to know the pains in the headaches of building websites back then. In 2001, I was working at basically a... It was basically a phone system company, but because it was a phone system company, they had fast pipes, the internet, they had T1s, T3s and whatnot, and they also did web hosting and they brought me in to help them out with maintaining all of these websites that had no functionality. They were just static marketing websites. Basically, if you buy a phone system, hey, we'll throw a website in there. And I just maintained the content. So static HTML, CSS wasn't even really a thing then. It was starting, but it wasn't really standardized yet. And while I was there working, a client came in and said, I need a website that will give me where I can list all of my properties. They owned properties in Colorado and they needed to be able to upload images, needed to put the square footage of each property in there. So basically, looking back, it sounds like a custom post-type with some extra metadata, but there wasn't a way to do that. The developer that we had on staff was too busy. He was doing ASP stuff. So we brought a contractor in and the contractor decided to use this new programming language called PHP. Once the project was completed, it was handed over to me and I started learning PHP. This was pre-YouTube. Any time I need to fix something today, I just go to YouTube, type in, how do I fix this plug-in? Or how do I fix this? How do I change the oil in my lawnmower? We didn't have those things. I would go to Barnes & Noble, which is a bookstore. I got a bunch of PHP and MySQL books and I learned how to program, make the pages that I was maintaining more dynamic. That predated all of these frameworks that we have like Django, Ruby on Rails, all those great tools. WordPress predates all of that stuff. You're going to hear me talk about WordPress in a negative light. It's not because WordPress isn't any good. It was really basic at the beginning. Anything I say in here that sounds negative, I've made a living off of WordPress ever since. I'm not complaining in any way, form or fashion. The early years, how many of you guys used WordPress before 2005? I see two. That sounds about right. WordPress is a fork of B2 or cafe log. It was discontinued by the original developers. Obviously, at least its source didn't die. It turned into WordPress because of Matt and Mike and what they did. I don't understand. The first version of WordPress was 0.7. I couldn't find a copy of 0.7. If you go to the website, go to wordpress.org, you won't see a 0.7. You'll see a 0.71. If anyone has the 0.7, let me know. I'd like to check that out to see what the difference is. It's probably a typo or something. I took a bunch of screenshots instead of trying to set up. I figured here I'm not going to have a computer where I can give you a demonstration of WordPress on a living server. I did screenshots, and it makes it probably a lot easier for me too, which is good. Just because something is open source it's going to be always easy to set up. I spent too much time trying to get a version of PHP 4.4 on a machine. I tried to go with a 2003 version of Debian, which is a Linux distro, and I kept failing. I would download an ISO and it couldn't find all the packages. None of the packages I was looking for, I just couldn't find it. I wound up finding a version of Debian on the Wayback machine, which hopefully didn't have any viruses or anything in it. I got it up and running and eventually after about three hours of hacking at it, I got WordPress up and running and it looked really ugly like this. This is what a browser looked like around 2008-ish, 2007, on a Linux machine, not the prettiest thing in the world. I was able to switch over to use Chrome or Chromium technically, and now I've got these better screenshots. This is the first version of WordPress I could get up and running. This is what WordPress looked like. It looked real simple. The login looks pretty much the same as it is now. It's a little prettier now. We have an updated logo now and the links here are moved around a little bit, but it's pretty much the same. Zoomed in version of that. When you log into WordPress, there was no dashboard. It was just boom, start writing. It was a very simple platform. Sorry, I'm learning this. I keep hitting the wrong button. You have basically things that you're going to be very familiar with within WordPress because you have post and edit. This was called team on the menu, which now is called users. The template is where you can edit. It wasn't a theme. The first version of WordPress was a one pager that displayed the blog. You have the links here, which actually links has kind of disappeared. I think if you wanted to use the links, you have to drop a line of code into your functions.php file to have links working. That kind of fizzled and disappeared. We have the my profile and then you can view the site and log out. One of the things that's really cool is that there's other terms that you're going to be very familiar with. You've got the title, excerpt, post, the categories, the published status, all of these things that are the exact same terms that we use today. When you go and you edit a page, I shouldn't say page, post, you just would scroll down on that page and you can start edit or you can add a new one here. When you edit it, pretty simple, you can drop in an excerpt, you could change the title. Very similar to what we have today. The delete this post is a little different. Overall, the terminology that we see in WordPress today is very similar to what we had 20 years ago. Your team management, which later was renamed to users, you can edit your users there. This is kind of unique right here. It says to delete a user, bring this level to zero, then click the red X. You can edit the user, change the level from 10 to 0, and then a little X mark will show up and then you can delete it. When you delete that user, all of its posts will disappear forever. Just like today, previously, I had a client contact me and say, the homepage is messed up. I was deleting users and I said you didn't reassign the post to a valid user. I'm assuming was fixed later because that's a pretty dangerous thing. If you only have one or two users and you delete that user, all the posts are gone. We still have the options page. This one is just pretty much the time zone, how you want the time to display. Notice there's no actual time zone. You can't specify which time zone you're in. I would assume it would have picked it up from the server, which I guess worked back then. It would be a little problematic now. We've got categories. You can add, edit, remove, delete, just like we do today. Then we have just built in. This is turned off on, I think about WP Engine. When you log into WP Engine, if you have a site on there, by default, they have the editor turned off if I'm remembering that correctly. A pretty dangerous feature to have right there where you can just edit the page because WordPress displayed just one single page, you can edit it right here. Notice there's no head, like WP head or WP footer or anything like that. That comes in the next version, I think in 1.5. Then, basically at the footer, it just closes. One simple page to display all of your blog posts, which is pretty simple, pretty basic, but it got the job done. The other feature that we had is managing links. Like I said, it's kind of disappeared now. It's a feature that's still in the database, but it's not built in any more. I thought it was kind of cool that Matt still gave credit to the original company, or person, I guess, that created the B2 blogging platform. Then, if you go up here, if you hit my profile, it would actually do a pop-up. This just kind of really shows the age here. We've got ICQ and AIM and MSN, Instant Messenger and Yahoo. We don't see Twitter, Facebook, the social media links that you would have today. In fact, I think a lot of these services are probably dead. I can't tell you the last time I used ICQ. It's probably been 15-plus years since I've used ICQ. Those were the tools we had back then. That's basically WordPress version 7.01. That's what it looked like, and that's how simple it was. But it started, to me, a revolution where now WordPress has 40-plus percent of the market share. Within this version, you can tell that everything was still prefixed. I guess not everything, but most things were still prefixed with a B2 prefix. You have instead of a wp-config.php file, you've got a b2-config.php file. The only things that are prefixed with WP is the WP admin and WP links, which the links doesn't even exist anymore and we just have a WP admin. If you look at the source code, it's kind of funny. This is the install script, which is slightly different than how you install WordPress. How many of you guys actually manually install WordPress now? Now we have installers that make it super simple to do. But this is what the install script looks like, and I'm just showing the source code here just to show it's messy, basically. I don't know how to say it nicely. We've got CSS injected in here, where this probably should be on a .css file somewhere. We also have a closing head tag and no opening head tag, and I sat there for five minutes before I got in front of a group of people like, does it say head somewhere? I couldn't find it, so it's kind of the first version of WordPress had incorrect HTML markup. Oh, and then the last thing. This is actually really cool. This link here that's in the CSS, it still works, so they kept that image live for 20 years, which that's pretty cool. I know that's not that big of a deal, but I think it's pretty awesome. Then if you look at the install script and you scroll down a little bit, you'll see some pretty funny stuff. Things like here on line 158 said, this is after you go to the page and you'll try to put in your MySQL username and password, and then when you hit submit and it works, it'll pop up and it'll say, did you defeat the boss monster at the end? Great, you're ready for step two, which that just shows that, if I showed that to a client now where WordPress had comical things in there, they probably wouldn't have taken WordPress quite as seriously, but it's cute and a little funny. Then you'll also see on the same script we were injecting SQL all on one page, where that should, in a bigger framework, a more mature framework, you would separate your SQL and your CSS and all that stuff into different files. But this was the first version. Then through the years, WordPress progressed. It was, in version one came out in 2004, and we have basic blogging like we did before, but we also have spam protection. In this version, we have everything, not everything, almost everything prefixed with WP now, except for there's a couple RSS feed files that are still prefixed with B2, but overall it was becoming more WordPress-labelled stuff. I thought this was kind of cool. The admin directory here was, there's only files in there. There's no directories. If you look at the WP admin now, there'll be nine directories which probably has, there's probably 500 files in that directory now because of all the functionality that we have. In 2004, we got the plugin architecture coming in and the sidebars. This also, in this same year, I'm just going to read this. The market leader in the blogging tools industry at the time was Moveable Type. They announced a new license term, which were not, that's were not like by many of the users. Basically it forced, it gave WordPress a big push because a lot of people moved away from Moveable Type and moved over to WordPress. So that was one of the first big pushes that we had. Also in this version, version 1.2, this wasn't labelled correctly. It's still identified as version 1.0.1, which is kind of cool. In 2005, and this is where I think WordPress started getting a lot more, something that we're familiar with, as someone that has written a ton of themes, this part to me was super important, 1.5. This is when I first started using WordPress and I was just using it as a blogging platform, but if you're into WordPress, and I'm going to run out of time here, so I'm going to skip a couple of things, that was a quote from Matt basically saying, we did this, which is we created, were you going to have themes, and instead of WordPress being on a single page, we now have all of these archives, not archives, we have all of these different page templates, which as a themeer that comes in super handy because it gives you this hierarchy that I've stared at for hours on end, trying to figure out why I'm not pulling in the right archive or template or whatever, so that's been in place for 18 years now, and this is what the theme looked like in 1.5, the default theme, which that's really what my blog looked like too because I wasn't that creative, I kept it blue and boring. In 2005, we got a better interface, we got a text editor finally, JavaScript was used for the first time on the pages, so when you edited a page, edited a page, it wouldn't, you didn't have to reload to see it, which is pretty handy, and then Acismet was also in this package, and I think it's still in there today, and this is what the interface looked like, starting to look kind of familiar, and now WordPress kind of as a CMS almost. Here we've got short codes, we have a revamped admin interface, the media library is better, and this is where I started theming and getting into really just breaking WordPress going in and figuring out how to do stuff, and that's when I started building themes. This is the interface that we got, and looks familiar, it's a little prettier than the original one, someone spent some time on theming here. This is when I started really using WordPress and this is where I consider WordPress as a good enough system for me to start building everything on WordPress. This is where custom post types came in, and with custom post types, we got a ton of functionality where I could build anything for any of my clients. You needed some kind of... You need articles, you had pages, you had your blog, but I need to do news articles. I could do a custom post type to do that, which gave me pretty much everything I needed to start really building WordPress. I also got a much prettier interface and a sidebar on the left as opposed to the menu being on the top in here. Then in 2011, we got an improved media library, the fly out menu that we still use today, and there's a drag and drop upload file for file management. In 2015, and I'm jumping pretty fast here, but we got the REST API, and I use the REST API not that often. How many of you guys edit or use the REST API? That is a much higher number than I expected. Normally in Atlanta when I do a meet up and I ask people, very few people are actually using the REST API. We use it regularly at our company, so it gave us a ton of functionality. In 2018, version 5.0, we got Gutenberg, the official page builder within WordPress. Then 5.5 in 2020, we got the lazy loading, we got the auto updating for plugins and themes, which finally broke something for me for the first time about a month ago, which was kind of annoying, but overall it was working really well for me. It was a bug in one of the plugins. Then we got site maps improvement. Then in 2021, with 5.5 we got full site editing, which I still have yet to use, but I'll be using it with a massive project that I'm doing this fall, and we're going to finally be using Gutenberg to build the whole site. Now we're almost caught up, but that is it. I am up for questions if anybody has any questions. I said I would forget about my water. Thanks now for turning my mic in. A round of applause for Aaron, please. That was a great talk. As Aaron mentioned, we have a QA now for 15 minutes. We've got space for questions. One question per person, please. If you've got anything else, you can ask Aaron after the talk. Do we have any questions from the floor? We've got one right there, please. That was great, Aaron. Thank you. I'm interested to know what you did for your client with the property when you didn't have the custom post height. We built a complete custom PHP website. There was property.php that would do the SQL stuff. It was just a lot of HTML and PHP, probably poorly written stuff. Any time I look at code, even if it's six months ago, that's why I feel bad dogging on WordPress. I'm critiquing something that's 20 years old. I look at code that's six months old and I can't believe I wrote like that. That was just a custom PHP build. I had no idea. I quit that job a couple of years later. The site was still up. I don't remember what it was. I have a copy of the source code or anything. I'd love to look at it. That would be funny to see. Thank you. Do we have another question from the floor? I've got a question for you. There's one over there. OK, great. That's cool. Let's have that one. Thank you, Connie. Is it on now? Yes. Can you remember when it was the first time you ever saw anything about security mentioned in any of the WordPress releases? I think that over the years it has gone from being not really security aware at all to being awfully bad at security, having an awfully bad reputation, but then it has over time now with the automatic updates and things like that direction from my perspective. But can you remember from the developer's perspective or the actual open source project perspective when somebody mentioned a thing called security for the first time? That is a really good question. I got, in 2013, I got about 20 sites hacked. And I'm trying to think of what I could have done to... I won't mention the hosting company's name, but all of the sites got hacked because they had something that was not standard and there was an animated pirate skull bouncing and spinning around on all of the websites on that server. But that was like 2013 and I know I didn't have anything like... I don't think WordFence did it exist in 2013? You know, I don't know. I don't remember... I don't remember anything when it comes to that. I really should go through my email and find that out. I don't remember. I know that when those sites got hacked around 2013, that's when I moved hosting and I started taking it more seriously. But I don't remember from the WordFence perspective and I don't know. Wish I could give you more, so sorry. Do you have another question from the floor? One there in the middle, please. He's got the mic. Shall I go first? Sorry, you're a lot further from the microphone. It's great to look at WordFence's history over the years and it's very easy to see all of the things we've gained. Do you think there's anything that we've lost from the simplicity of the earlier versions? Spicy question. That's hard. I once worked on a website and once I logged in, I said I'm not working on that site. I can't say I really worked on it. There were 104 active plugins on the site and I said I'm not touching it. I would say that one of the things we've... I don't know if we've lost, but one of the problems is that we have so many plugins that do so many things and people don't think through a lot of times. And it's not at their own... I mean, it's not their fault if they have a tool and it's so easy to push a button to just, oh, I need something to add this and this and this and you wind up having all this repetitive plugin to do one thing. So I would say maybe we've gotten a little too bloated in the aspect in the plugin world. But that's... I can't tell all the sponsors here. You know that. And it's not them. We have a lot of... I think it's users just tend to add a lot. So it's more of a user issue or lack of knowledge. I tend to tell people when we build a website, when we build a site, we wind up having about 10 plugins. 10 to 12. And I tell people if you wind up having 20 plugins, you probably need to rethink what you're doing and there's probably a custom solution that needs to be built. And now when I say custom, probably custom WordPress, because we build everything within WordPress because, again, I see WordPress as a platform more so than a blogging platform or even a marketing tool. To me it's a tool to build anything that you can imagine. I think we had... Did someone else had a question in the middle? Okay. I'm glad I have a hat on because it's blocking the lights. Just curious about you being in the game for so long. Have there ever been times where you thought, like, no, I want to do something else in WordPress? Yeah, and I've gone through that. Actually, in 2008, I set up about 10 different CMSs and kind of compared the Joomla, Drupal, Concrete 5. CMS made simple, a lot of them. And WordPress wind up winning. And I love it. No, I don't think I'll ever... I tell people that there are so many websites that are based on WordPress right now. If WordPress were to die today, I probably will be able to be an old man that is fixing WordPress sites because there's so many of them. There's going to be legacy stuff. If it disappeared today, there would be legacy stuff that has to be maintained for years on end. And I think I'm too old to change at this point. I have so much vested in the knowledge of WordPress. It's just so much easier to build things on WordPress versus... I mean, like in 2006, I learned some Ruby on Rails stuff. Love Ruby on Rails. But it's a lot more... I was doing websites for like $3,000, $4,000, and a Ruby on Rails project, it's going to need a lot more than that, so it was just much easier to use WordPress then. I don't think I'll ever veer off unless for some reason it goes super, super crazy. We have such a good community where I just don't think it would happen. I think I'm going to be an old guy that's editing WordPress until I retire. Thanks, that was a great question. Do we have any more questions from the floor? We've got a few more minutes left. Well, I've got one then. Over the course... You've shown us over the course of 20 years of WordPress back when people still had blog roles and things like that before Stack Overflow. Horrible thought. But what do you think has been the change with the most impact over that 20 years? Was it the Hello Dolly plug-in? I started trying to process my question before I... Give me the last part of the question again. I was only joking. The thing that changed the most, I know that Gutenberg is a big deal, but again, I haven't started using it. I used Beaver Builder to build most of the sites. Now I'm going to have an enterprise site that I'm building in the fall where I'm going to use Gutenberg because I need that site to last me 10 years. I can change out page builders if it's just a marketing site that has little functionality. I can change that out every three years when they decide to rebrand or whatever. That's not that big a deal. I think the thing that changed the most, at least for me, I know that the REST API is super important, but that's, to me, more higher-level companies that will be accessing that. To me, the custom post types just has to be the most important thing because we used to go in and if we needed, let's say, press releases or something, the company had press releases, you would create a press release category, you would hide it from the blog and then you would display it on a specific page and it was such a headache to try to hide, to make WordPress do what it should be doing. Sponsors, there's plenty of them around. I'm sure you'll find some interesting plug-ins out there that will do work for you. We have the WP Connect sessions. They're available at the Trianti balcony on level one. Thanks very much for coming to this talk and hopefully we'll see you for the next one. Thank you. Hi, everyone. Welcome to track three. I'm Matt on your host for this session, which is the final session of the morning before lunch, so I'm sure you're all looking forward to. Food's pretty good here. So the format that we've got today, it's a 30-minute talk followed by 15-minute Q&A. So the speaker we have for this session is joining us from Bulgaria. It's Vassie Valcianova. She's a digital marketing strategist, trainer and speaker. 20 years of experience in marketing strategy, content marketing, brand messaging and conversion rate optimization. Today she's going to talk about personal branding for digital professionals. That is all of you. How to work on your personal branding strategy. So it's going to be an action blueprint to help you achieve that. So I'd like you to give a big warm welcome. Welcome to Vassie, please. Hey, everyone. Okay, awesome. So I know I'm the one thing keeping you from lunch and I'll try to make this as useful and as practical as possible. And I want to say that being here on stage in Athens is a really big pleasure and I thank you also for taking the time and giving me your attention and make sure to be good for it. So I'm not going to spend a ton of time talking about myself. You can read more online or just connect with me on social media. And I'll be telling you more about what I do as we go along in the discussion. But being here in this wonderful venue, it almost feels like I need to sing something. But I like you too much to do that to you guys. But I'd still like to test the acoustics of the hall with a simple exercise. So whenever I get asked about what I do, I tell people that I help brands build relationships with their audiences. And that's a fancier way of saying I am doing marketing. So I'd really love to know what all of you guys do. And the way we're going to do that is obviously I'm not going to have time to shake everyone's hands here. But I want you to think of one phrase or sentence. It may be I'm in marketing, I'm building plugins, I'm a developer, it can be simple as that. And I'm going to count to three and I'll ask you guys to shout it out so that I can learn more about the audience over here. Obviously I won't be able to hear anything, but let's give it a go. So you guys ready? One, two, three. OK? Can we do that a bit louder at three again? One, two, three. OK. And that's a perfect example why all of us need digital marketing and personal branding. Because with the multitude of digital professionals who are most of them very capable, very interesting, the online space is just as crowded as we have here today. And the way for you to actually get noticed isn't shouting at your potential customer what you do, but it's being mindful about how you present yourself in public. And this is what I'll try to teach you today. So just a quick note at first. I'll be going through this presentation at a high speed. If you miss anything, if you want me to repeat anything, for sure ask me during the Q&A. But also in the end I have a slide where you'll be able to download the slide deck and get some additional resources around marketing in general. So no worries if you miss anything. So whenever we start talking about branding and brand value, there's usually one thing that marketers like me want to initially talk about and that's the actual monetary value of a brand. What you see on the screen here is research by the company Interbrand. So what they have is this annual global brand index that they do, and they try to put a dollar sign to any brand you have. So at the top here you see Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and so on and so forth. And these are big brands with a ton of value. So Apple according to Interbrand is at 482, I think, billion dollars. That's billion with a B. So what does that mean, though? Like why would a brand be valuable and what actually is a brand? Most people, whenever we mention a brand, they are thinking about a logo. So for Starbucks that's the two-tailed mermaid that they have. But a brand is actually a lot more than that. It's what they themselves say they do, which according to Starbucks' website is inspiring and nurturing the human spirit. Okay, that's a tall order. Or it can be anything you think about when you think about Starbucks. It can be their over-complicated way of ordering a coffee, the way their places feel when you enter them, or even the amazingly skilful ways in which any barista mispell your name a hundred different ways, especially if you're coming from Eastern Europe, that's like a given. So a brand is really one simple thing, and I think Jeff Bezos put it in the most succinct and simple way. This is what people say about you when you're not in the room. So take a moment and think about your own clients. What would they say about you when you're not in the room? I'm pretty sure it's going to be positive, but is it even the right way of phrasing what you do? Are they going to mention the services that you want to promote yourself? Are they going to mention the skills that you want to show off? This is why we need to be strategic about personal branding. And to get through this, we need to make sure that we're differentiating ourselves from everyone else online or everyone else in our own industry or anyone else in our area if we're working locally with clients and so on. Because these are the two options you have really, you can either make sure you're differentiating yourself from any other digital professional out there or you have to compete by price. And competing by price is a race to the bottom. You can't really lower your prices as much as the next person can lower them. That's never a good play. So making sure that we're differentiating ourselves is what we're trying to aim for here. And to do that, we need to fulfil three brand-building goals. The first one is getting people to know us, then getting them to like us, and getting them to trust us. So let's take each one of these at hand. So knowing, what do we mean by knowing? That's the marketer's favourite term, brand-awareness. It sounds very big and important. But really, it's about turning these guys frown upside down. So this is a great ad and I'm sure, especially the guys all the way in the back can't read it, so I'm going to tell you what he says. He says, I don't know who you are, I don't know your company. I don't know your company's product, I don't know what your company stands for, I don't know your company's customers, company's record, company's reputation. Now, what was it you wanted to sell me? You can't really get to selling something, your services or your product or your agency's work, unless people actually know who you are. So you need to pass that first hurdle in order to get there. And I think that as the people of WordPress here, we have a great advantage of that, because getting people to know us can be done in three simple ways. The first is meeting them where they're at. So you want to get clients from a particular industry or from a particular area or different types of clients. Maybe you're just aiming at a small starting of direct-to-consumer brands, let's say. Then you need to share with them what you know. You need to show them that you are good for it, that you have the expertise, that you know what's going on. And then you need to help them out. Show them that it's not just about getting their business and getting their money, it's about making sure that they're as successful as humanly possible. And all of these three things is what we do when talking on stage at a WordCamp event, or when going to a meet-up, or when participating in Slack or in different online communities in your area. I've been on the receiving end of that amazing WordPress community more times than I can count, because as a marketer, I have the tendency to break things, and I would often need to ask a friend to actually check what did I mess up this time and how we can improve that or fix it, at least. So being there and giving away some of your knowledge is the first step of getting known. And I often get people say, okay, Vasi, but if I give out my knowledge, why are they going to hire me? What makes them decide to hire me rather than do it on their own? Isn't that just simpler and more cost-effective? And the answer is not necessarily. This is a blog post I wrote way back about a particular customer development technique called jobs to be done. So what you do with jobs to be done is really simply talk to existing customers or potential customers to figure out how they make buying decisions. And this is a big part of the research that I do for customers. This blog post is according to the read time plug-in that I use on my site about 20 minutes long. So it's a very meaty piece where I go through every step of the process. I give people the templates that I use. I give them the interview script that I base my interviews on. And I share everything that I can about that process and what people need to know. And even though I've shared everything there is to know about this, I often get this type of emails. That's a screenshot of an actual discussion with a potential client. And he says, thanks so much for sharing that. I now see that it's a very complex process, so will you help me actually do jobs to be done research for my starting company? And when you explain to people how complex your process is, this is the best way for you to show them that you know your stuff and that they will be better off hiring someone than doing the work for themselves. So this is how sharing what you know can actually be a way of getting hired for a new gig rather than just getting people to, you know, steal your process. The second step here is to not just get them to know you but to get them to like you. So how do they create a preference for you? How do they decide that you are the one person out of the myriad of different digital professionals that they can hire who's going to do a good job? Well, we can take some wisdom off of Albert Einstein here who says that it's better to be a person of value rather than a person of success. So you don't just need to be good at what you do, you need to show people that you are good at it and you need to give them something of value first. And there's a very simple business case for value that I'm going to share with you here and it goes both through the human psychological part of it but also the way digital channels work nowadays and the way algorithms promote content that's valuable. So if you think about it, you can think of it as a flywheel of sorts. You're trying to bring more value to more people so you create content online, you share what you know, you answer questions in online communities, you meet people where they're at, you give them some piece of advice. Then this valuable content gets engagement. So the more valuable your content is, the more people are going to like it, comment on it, share it with friends, decide to forward your newsletter, tell someone that they've heard a great podcast that you happen to offer. And once that happens, this engagement makes that content more visible and gets you more eyeballs. So it's sort of a flywheel. Then once you get more eyeballs, this means that you're bringing that value to more people who are going to engage with it and so on and so forth. So if you can share what you know and give people useful information, then you're good for that. You're going to get liked because you're giving them something of value. And there are three different types of value that you can bring. The first one is informational value. So sharing what something is essentially. And this is, well, I need to mention AI for sure because we're in this particular year of our Lord 2023 where everything's about AI. So informational value is going to be quickly eaten up by AI generated content because it's easy to answer the question what something is. But you can create a lot more value by bridging informational and functional value which is telling people how to do something. So this means not just telling them what, in my previous example, jobs to be done research is, but giving them some idea about how to do that. In your case, it may be optimizing a website, building out a Gutenberg blog. I don't know whatever it is you do. This can be a great connection between these two types of value. And the third one that we often forget when we're talking about business and branding and interactions in a business environment, it's emotional value. But it's just as important. You need to show people something that's going to motivate them, inspire them, make them laugh, make them smile, feel good about themselves. And this is just as important when we're talking about business as when we're talking about like a simple interpersonal relation with a friend or anything like that. And finally, we want to think about building trust. And trust is sort of the most important element in here because, as Ziegler said, if people like you, they will listen to you, but if they trust you, they will actually do business with you. So you need to clear each one of these three hurdles in order to get people to assign you to a new project or assign a contract with you and so on. And the way we build trust is by simply being our best selves. And seeing simply here is a bit of an understatement, right? I mean like being your best self is a pretty tall order. But the reason I'm saying this is that people actually trust people who are very much like all of you in this room. Because according to research, this is research done by the Edelman group and they, every year, they ask people who's a trusted spokesperson. And the top two, like two out of the top three here are what all of you guys are. A technical expert. And I mean technical here in the broader sense of the term. Me as a marketer, I'm also a technical expert. So I know my industry and I know my work. And then the third one is a person like myself. So the more direct, the more approachable, the friendlier you can be, the better you're off in earning that trust. So it's not about, you know, putting yourself up there and making yourself seem like this big, you know, expert using these multi-syllable words and trying to seem like the most, you know, formal type of guy or gal. It's about bridging the professional and the personal because at that intersection there's where trust happens. In my work with clients, yes, I give them very specific and well thought out marketing advice. But I also talk with them about what runs we go on because I'm a fan of running. I share a lot about my cat, maybe more than it's wise but you know, she's adorable so, you know. I share about any other personal interest that I have a lot of my clients, for example, are very aware that I run an NGO that does science communication and that I'm a bit of a science geek. So building all of these facets of my life, it gives them a better perspective as to who they'll be working with. Because I mean, come on, we don't want to work just with a very good expert. We want to work with someone that's fun to work with. If you're going to be working with that person on a daily basis, you need someone you're going to like. And that's why you need to show off your personal side as well. So moving through each of these steps, what you're trying to do is get more people to know about you than get a big percentage of those people to like you and get a big percentage of those people to trust you. And this in marketing is what we call audience development. Another big jargon word, but I mean, I'm on stage, so I need to use some of those from time to time. And whenever we're talking about being bigger audiences, people usually start thinking about how they can, you know, do a gimmick, you know, get viral. This is like the Holy Grail, right? Or create a post that's going to get a lot of traction on LinkedIn. And yes, these things are useful because you're building a bigger audience, but you also need to think about the hierarchy of those different people who are paying attention to you. So every different type of engagement sits on a different hierarchical level. So this is a very simple generic example that I've created here, but say you have, like me, an online membership site, like a course you're building or a community you're using. This is going to be at the top of your priority list, getting more people in there, even though that audience may be, let's say, 50 or 100 people, that's way more useful than some of the other channels and audience types that you're going to see down the list. Then we can think about email subscribers. So if you have a newsletter, if people give you their email address, that means they trust you a ton. So you can put that high on top of your priority list of audience development. And then when we go further down, we may think of long-form content like blog posts, or about creating a podcast series or a video series if you have people in your industry that you want to create content together with. And then we go through all of the social media channels that make sense. So for me, LinkedIn is on a different step than all of the other social networks because this is the place where I get the most warm audience, as they say, so people who are actually ready to hear about my services and my coaching and so on. And all of the other social channels, they're a way for me to show off the personal side and engage with people, but they're not as important. So when you're thinking about building this audience for yourself, make sure that you're not just focusing on the big volume stuff which would be social media, but make sure you focus on the things higher up in that list. A few hundred people on a newsletter, I'm going to take that any day of the week against a couple of hundred thousand social media followers because the fact that you have social media followers doesn't mean necessarily that people are paying attention. If they're getting your newsletter in their inbox every week, now that's the attention I'm talking about and that I'm interested in. So you're probably seeing already that I'm a fan of the number three, so I'm going to talk about audience building in three different ways. That's creating content, so building stuff on your own. Content curation, which is finding interesting content all across the web or any other channel and then sharing that with your audience. And then the third one that we often don't think about, but it's actually a lot more important than the other two even, that's communication. So one-on-one conversations that don't necessarily scale even in digital channels, but that are just as important. So when I'm talking about creating your own content, you need to find yourself the channel and format that feels good to you and that people are actually going to engage with. So for me, for example, I feel most comfortable with text-based content, which is why I invest the most time in creating blog posts and newsletters. This is my personal preference, this is what I feel comfortable with, and I know that a lot of my audience is still interested in text-based content rather than just video and so on. You'll know for yourself what is going to work, but if you're not necessarily comfortable standing in front of a camera, well, then don't be. Don't go and start creating video content if that's not a channel or a format that you're not interested in, because it's going to be very difficult to sustain that in the long run. So making sure that you pick something that works for you, this is the best thing possible. One great example that I love is this guy right here, his nickname is Tank. He's a teacher of B2B English in Bulgaria, and he has this hashtag that he has created for himself called SIP of English. Every day he shares a really long text-based post on LinkedIn that talks about different idioms or different ways of using the English language to your full potential in a business setting. So he already has 2,000 followers of this hashtag, and he's a single person, he's one English teacher. How many clients do you think he needs to fill up his capacity? Well, probably less than 2,000, that's what I'm going to say. And this is the type of engagement you may want to be interested in. He obviously feels comfortable sharing written content and not being in video, so this is working from him, and he has already shared a bunch of these. So he's in this screenshot is number 417, and this was almost a year ago or something like that, so by now he must have amassed a whole new set of numbers. If you are comfortable with video, then do that for yourself. Probably some of you know Mario Pesci from DevRx, so he does amazing short form videos where he talks about different topics related to entrepreneurship, business management, and so on. And the cool thing about Mario's content is that it shows that you don't really need high production value, you need to have good sound on video, that's the most important thing, and you need to have a good idea that people are going to be interested in. He's just sitting in his office in front of a whiteboard talking about whatever he wants to tell you today, and this is the type of content that works for him. So he's found the right channel and the right format that works for him. When talking about curating content, the value in this comes from you being essentially a filter of sorts. So if you're creating your own content, this means that you're helping people find the right information at the right time without needing to read anything. If you look on my website, you see that for my newsletter, the value proposition there is, I read 180 articles every week, so you don't have to. So I'm scanning all of this incoming marketing-related content, and I'm giving you the five or six most interesting links that I've stumbled across in the last week. This is the value that I bring. It's about summarising all of this and giving you the few pieces you need to pay attention to. Another example from the WordPress community more specifically, Remcos has a great newsletter around the latest news around WordPress. So I don't necessarily read as much about WordPress and the development of the platform, but when I signed up for his newsletter, I'll be getting the most important news in my inbox every week. And the additional value that he brings to me is that he doesn't just share a link, he actually has a short summary and his own personal point of view on that same topic. So curating content in that way, it can take a lot of different forms. Another example, more in my space, is a website called Marketing Examples by Harry Dry. So what Harry does is he collects different marketing campaigns that are great examples of different approaches in marketing. And this is his way of curating content. So he shows me the example and tells me why it's interesting to him and why it's important. So doing that can be creating a quick weekly podcast that summarizes news in your industry. It can be sharing these links on social media with a short recap of why that piece is important. It can take a lot of different forms, but you need to find your own. And finally, communication. And this is where we sort of, we marketers make everything worse because we've made people believe that it's about broadcasting your message to the largest potential audience. And that's not it. The it in this sense is that you need to talk to people one-on-one. So when you go out here to have lunch, speak to a new person on a one-on-one, non-scalable, very personal, physical level. When you're online, you know, every week make it a rule for yourself to speak to five people that you haven't recently kept in touch with, just to check what's going on with them, maybe comment on their latest post on social media, maybe just reach out in Messenger or Slack or whatever, and just see what's happening. Maybe there's going to be something interesting that comes out of that. But even if there isn't, it's just you being human, and that's still very, very important. So to recap this, we just need four hours a week to start. And I made sure to have that in my presentation because I know that talking about personal branding can feel very overwhelming to people who've never done it. And it can be like, okay, but I have my own work, and then I try to look for clients, and then now I need to spend more time to create content. That's a big ask. And you don't need a lot of time. So when I say four hours, that's not a blanket statement. I've actually done the math. So if you're creating your own content, you'll need about two hours a week to start building a podcast or a newsletter or just have social posts planned for the whole week ahead, let's say. This is, again, you can build on top of this number in the long run if it makes sense for you, but it can be just two hours a week to start. Then you want to curate content. And here I'm putting one hour because you're reading on a daily basis stuff related to your industry anyway. So making sure that you remember to tag the pieces that are most interesting and then batch process them at the end of the week to share on social media or in a newsletter or in any other channel that makes sense. This is easy work because you've already done the majority of it. And then the thing that doesn't scale, you can't batch process communication, but maybe take 10 minutes a day with your afternoon coffee or tea or mate or whatever. You can tell me afterwards what would be your beverage of choice. And talk to people, DM someone who you haven't been in contact with, comment on posts, or even recommend others content. Make sure that you're a positive person to begin with. And this is how you can make sure that you have everything you need to start working on your personal brand and it is more challenging than shouting at the audience what you do, but it's way more effective. So to finish this off, I mentioned you can either scan this or go to www.volcanova.me.wc.eu23 where you find the slides and also a link to my newsletter. This is my way of curating content so you may find it valuable if you're interested in more in marketing. And you can also see more of my work there and some additional information about what I do. So thank you so much and I'll be happy to answer any questions. Thank you, Vasily. That was absolutely great. I really enjoyed that. So as Vasily said, we got 15 minutes now for QA. If anyone would like to ask a question, please put your hand up and someone will come to you with a microphone. I'm just going to start off with one if that's okay. So you were talking really there about real human to human marketing and marketing can often come across as slightly forced or false. So how would you recommend that people come across authentically and present themselves best? So what I usually do, especially like this event is a perfect example, when going down the hallway and I stop at the sponsor booth or I sit down next to someone while having my coffee, I'm not going to start with, hey, Matt, I do great marketing. Would you need some? I'm going to go with, hey, like, are you liking the event? What was the most interesting talk for you? So what do you do? What are you currently working on? And then if an opportunity presents itself, I'm going to go in there and I'm going to be, oh, that's really interesting. By the way, I had a client that's running into the same sort of industry and this is what I do. It's like marketing consulting, so maybe that's something you're interested in. We can talk more. And then we're going to continue talking about probably me showing a photo of my cat, I'm sorry, or some other topic. So if the person, you know, like if they show interest in that, then I'm going to continue on and talk more. If they don't, I'm not going to push it at that particular moment. But it has happened to me before at events where, you know, I'll meet someone and we'll have just a friendly, non-work-related discussion at all. And then a few months down the line, like, we're going to connect on LinkedIn, I'm going to shoot you a message every now and then and be like, hey, like, I sold this, I know it's related to what you do. I'm going to comment on the post and then maybe in a few months they're going to say, hey, Vossy, like we're actually trying to ramp up on the US market, could you help me out with that? So, again, it's about building connections. All right, awesome. And cat photos, thank you. Do you have any questions from the audience, please? Anyone want to ask a question of Vossy about branding? Can I see any hands up, anyone? One right there, please. We have a mic in the middle, thank you. That's the brave person who raises their hand first. Thank you so much. You only have, like a, you only need like a handful of customers, maybe like the example you gave of the English tutor. What would be your approach to marketing? Because I don't have very much time to do a lot of things. I could probably stretch to four hours, but like it's like, is there any particular approach that would be different? Because I don't really need to get hundreds of people interested that would be suitable to work with me. And what do you do? I'm a designer, but I offer agency quality design as a subscription service. So I can only do so. Yeah, so you're working on a retainer with people. Yeah, I get it. So that's again, pretty similar to my own work. So I'm one woman show. I work with clients on a retainer basis or on a project basis. And this is again the case where I would need just a few clients to work with at any given time. What I would do is I'm going to focus on one or maybe two channels at most where I'm going to start doing this. So this is something that may have come across differently when I'm speaking about the hierarchy. By no means mean that you need to have all of these different channels in your arsenal. You can focus on one or two. So if we're talking about design I would start off thinking what would be the channels where I can find people. So to me still, let's say LinkedIn would be a good place to be and show off some of my work but also maybe it may be a completely different place like an online community where people look for design services, something like Behance for example or something like that where you can create longer form content and then you can use one channel to feed off the other. So for example when you're putting up something on Behance you can share about it on LinkedIn and then you can also on LinkedIn you can say hey like I have this this whole portfolio and here's a quick post about let's say a particular design trend that I'm currently seeing take up a lot of attention here's how I've actually implemented that in the past. Thank you. Great, we have another question there a gentleman in the white t-shirt. Hi Vassie, great talk, I really enjoyed it. You said you had 150 articles you read a week so we don't have to? How do you find all of these? Do you have any sort of tools or anything? Unfortunately Google Readers no longer a thing or RSS really but any sort of tools that you use to kind of get access to them? Yeah, I'm really happy you mentioned RSS and I really love the fact that RSS is still not that contrary to what a lot of people are going to say. So there are two separate tools that I may recommend in this direction. The one I'm currently using is called Readwise Reader and then the other one that I used to work for before but I was also a happy customer for many years is called Inno Reader one word. They're both based off of RSS but you can also add a lot of other stuff in there. So for example all the newsletters that I'm subscribed to maybe like 40% of these 180 articles that I read per week are supplied to me through the filter of other people. So for example if we're talking SEO Alay the Solace, she has SEO FOMO, yeah. If we're talking about marketing then maybe marketing brew is another newsletter that I'm subscribed to where I get a lot of a lot of new content that I'm interested in and when I start seeing a website that I'm reading more often let's say every week I get a piece off of this particular website then I'm just going to add it to my RSS subscription and then I'm going to read off of that. Thanks that was a great question. Do you have any more questions from the audience please? With their hand up. Lady over there please. Hi and thank you for today. I wanted to ask if it is better to have presence in more social networks and other channels and do less quality work because there is not much time or better focus on one two maybe three do it good there. I definitely go for the second option I would first focus on one channel or two channels at most and then I'm going to maybe I might have supplementary channels so for example again with my own work I'm currently focused on LinkedIn and my newsletter and these are the two places where I actually pay attention I'm trying to do more I'm actively participating let's say on LinkedIn I'm trying to make sure that I'm putting really high quality stuff out there with my newsletter I have at the same time Twitter that I'll most probably use at events like this and so a bit sporadically and I also have Instagram where I'll be sharing like more personal stuff so showing that personal side on top of the professional but these are less work and less how to say pay as much effort into promoting myself in there they're just for fun if you will thank you very much one question there please hello Vassie and thank you very much for the speech it was amazing so my question is regarding colour psychology so some people say that this is really important when it comes to personal branding like you have to pick a certain colour because then this way you're going to be transmitting certain like feelings and so so I wanted to know like your insight in this regards like how important is this really and is this something that you really have to take into account or consider whenever you're building your personal brand so it may be a bit of an unpopular opinion but as I mentioned I'm a bit of a science geek so I've dug into the topic of colour psychology and according to research I've read there isn't like a ton of it in there different experiments that have been done can't really be replicated that well there isn't really a ton of information about it and also different colours have different meanings in different cultures so it will be very hard if you're promoting yourself on an international market right what I do know though is that whenever I'm wearing red I'm much more open to people and I feel more energized so I'll maybe use colour psychology in that way so make the brand reflect you so people would often know like you've also seen in my presentation the two colours I use are red and yellow which are two of my favourites and they give me energy so this is how I use them as long as you're not combining stuff that should never be combined in front of a human eye then I think you're all good of course working with a designer who can help you elevate that brand a bit and make it look a bit more sophisticated that's great work I don't necessarily because I've had that question before I don't necessarily start off with a logo for yourself I don't have one but this is mostly because I have my own website and I needed something to put there and this is how it came together at first I don't think that this is as important maybe if you want to invest in that yourself you can but that's not really like a prerequisite for building a personal brand a set of good photos though is so this is like a piece of unsalisted advice there thanks great question just from the floor there in the middle please hello I'm currently looking for a new job and on the job search I'm thinking about my own personal brand and one thing I discovered which is probably a relatively new phenomenon is that there are automated tools for scanning resumes and so the personality is now not a part of the resume and I'm wondering if you have thoughts about your personal brand to a job search while still I don't know adhering to the needs of the AI gods out there that are actually reading these things that's a very interesting question and it's sort of a stroke of serendipity if you will because I used to work for a company that does a resume builder app so I can share more after I don't want to make this about promoting different brands and services I can share the link and we've dug really deeply into a resume scanning software and so on so for a resume it definitely needs to be easily readable by a machine to get you through that initial sort of search but also you can keep in mind that building a reputation for yourself is also the best way to like future proof your career in general so whenever I've been like openly looking for a new position or for a new client let's say if I have additional availability I've always relied on actually you know spreading the words across my own personal network and I've most often gotten good recommendations through that so in this case like if you're recommended for a position if they know about you and they've seen you at an event so maybe you know talked with you at a networking event maybe this is a better way to zero in there because in this case your resume wouldn't necessarily need to go through the standard application process in that same in that same way so while easily scannable resume is important personal branding can go a lot farther than that and having an easily scannable resume that's also nice to look at but it's also very easy to achieve nowadays thank God because they're running the they're running in the background making sure that it works with machines as well as humans great thank you for your thoughts right thanks for that question we're gonna have to wrap up the QA there but I'm sure if you have any more questions for Vassie I imagine she's quite open to networking while we're here so seek her out and find her but I think before we finish please thank you, thank you so much great, thank you look over there hey thanks a lot that was great right before everyone heads off for lunch I just need to tell you about lunch it's served on multiple levels so it's served out there and in the foyer below if you're looking for Halal or Kosher it's on this level thank you everyone just want to say thank you for attending the morning sessions they've been great sessions and workshops will start again at 2pm sharp this afternoon and we also have a WP connect session which is all about coming back to in-person events that's in the Triante balcony and if you have any questions come and grab a volunteer and a blue shirt thanks very much can you hello good afternoon this we are about to start for the afternoon session first my name is Kingsley I work at automatic as a happiness engineer and this is my first world camp ever thank you, thank you okay so the first session we'll be having we'll be calling the speaker shortly but before while some folks are still getting seated how many of us here has never told a lie is there anybody here who has never told a lie someone raised their hands anyone so short story I have this friend and each time we talk he tells me no I haven't I've never told a lie like okay do you have a computer I said yes do you install software he said yes okay do you have a phone he said yes and do you install software he said yes and you have never told a lie let's do a simple experiment so I brought his computer and then we got his software we installed it and then we launched it and then the software said blah blah blah blah blah blah blah have you read the terms and conditions and he said yes and I said let's hold that thought you just lied because nobody reads the terms and conditions basically okay so that's it thank you very much now the first speaker we have is from Bulgaria and she's going to be talking on WordPress extended build unique website on top of WordPress her name is Petya Petkova please round of applause as she come on stage thank you so much Calimera everyone I hope you had your lunch and you're ready for a new portion of knowledge today thanks for joining me today here at World Camp Europe 2023 I cannot express with words how excited I am to be here and also how nervous I am to be here because it's my first time speaking at World Camp Europe so cheer up a bit to the world of pressure much appreciated thank you so much well oh maybe we should start the presentation from the first slide if possible let me just quickly go backwards sorry about that it's a spoiler alert so keep your eyes closed don't watch we'll go through each of the slides alright so today I want to share with you how we can elevate WordPress in order to have truly customized and tailor made websites and before we start I would like to share a few words about myself, I promise I'm not going to bore you so I built my first website WordPress website back in 2016 and it was about the dental studio I was visiting back then and I was thinking alright these people are providing tremendous service and somehow I wanted to showcase it in a web experience that is going to attract of course new clients and so on and so forth and because of my lack of experience with WordPress back then I've used pre-built team and it served its purpose the website came out and it was fine and what has changed since then till now I'm going to review in the next slides during the years I've established my own web agency but what excites me the most and what makes my heart sing is sharing knowledge and this is why we are here today too I've created an initiative called DevBondi which is all about sharing knowledge and opening the doors to web development and more specifically WordPress websites development I have two personalities as well I started as a front-end developer back in 2013-14 but it took me no more than like four years to realise that what stands under the hood also fascinates me so I basically rolled up my sleeves and dive deeper into the back-end world development and working in the web industry and having the privilege to work in this industry give me the opportunity to have first-hand experience on how technology impacts our daily life so you might wonder what we are going to talk about today, right? Well you see in our digital era websites have become cornerstones for brands and businesses and the demand for tailor-made experiences has skyrocketed pretty much so in order to accomplish this purpose and to provide clients and brands with unique websites we need to dig deeper to work with technologies and strategies which can separate our product or their product eventually from cookie cutter designs and overloaded themes and of course let's first identify the problem well how many of you have experienced some sort of deja vu while scrolling the internet and seeing pretty much the same screens raise a hand, right? so many of you well of course there are a lot of techniques that can't be just dismissed but there is always a way to provide spice of uniqueness and just something that will make your website remarkable and memorisable for all the visitors that have been on it and instead of just talking I've gathered some examples for you and you might be surprised to find out that more of 30% of all WordPress websites have been built on top of five or let's say six WordPress teams of course these teams have wild range of elements and different patterns and layouts but still as you can see we have pretty much a header standard header we have this big bright background images most often they might be videos as well then we have some A catching title and of course called action because we want our visitors and our users to take some action on our website and you might wonder how this might be a problem or issue well let's take a moment to shift our perspective from clients point of view for clients their digital presence is not about just having a website a simple website with their domain and some basic information and so on their digital presence represents their values and their unique identity and often this abundance leads them to let's say issues when it comes to pre-built teams that it might overloads them with so many functionalities that they actually do not need or with functionalities that different teams do not offer on the other hand we as developers improve our skills to have our stack filled with different technologies and libraries such as React, such as View such as WebGL how many of you heard of WebGL oh wow that's perfect thank you great so you know when building a WordPress website combining it with WebGL or promoting this to the client what do you mean it is just a WordPress website so anyways if we can make any conclusion here is that clients wants to have their website unique but most importantly they also want it to be easy to maintain to add new content to extend its content and so on and so forth developers wants to work with new technologies and to improve themselves constantly well as every problem out there this one has a solution too and WordPress actually can be the solution how well in the next part of our talk actually I would like to introduce you to some technologies different libraries and different approaches that can enable you to break free from repetitive designs and this repetitive functionalities and by saying that I would like to start with the front end well by definition front end is combining three main aspects motion interaction and user interface and by motion what we understand by motion is having the sense of touching something or to see how the elements come into the page or how they flew through the page or what happens when you rewalt the page right then by interaction we can say that it's like when a visitor clicks on a button what would happen is the button is going to change its background or to shrink or to expand or when the user submits the form let's say for example what would happen then is going to redirect them to thank you page is it going to stay and asynchronously reload the page what will happen and last but not least is user interface and when we are talking about user interface we are taking all the fonts, all the colors even the tone of voice of the website is going to be more like friendly or it's going to be more like cooperative and all the images as well so combining these three aspects we can have really customized and tailor-made experience for the brand or for the clan or even for ourselves if we are building like a portfolio website example so with humans like to sense the reality through our senses what do I mean by that well we like to touch things right we like to smell things we like to feel the comfort and we like to see beautiful things in front of us so the first thing a visitor see when opening your website is how does it look what typography does it have what colors does it have and so on and so forth on top of typography I would like to start with two yet super simple but super powerful tools and those are colors and typography well actually I'm going to show you an example here as you can see here in this example we have big bright titles on top of provocative and contrasting background and what creates this an emotion and once the emotion is created it leads to engagement and that's the main goal of our website no matter what the content is right we want users to feel engaged and to come back onto our website the next thing I want to point out and actually I have a question for you in one sentence can somebody tell me what is storytelling one sentence any volunteers okay I'll show you a quick example yeah oh how to reverse it yes communicating value communicating value yes you're absolutely right well thank you so much just me get back to my example here so it's a website actually in this website you can see the history of cinematography in just about few scrolls you can see first it was black and white then they added colors then we have even more special effects like on the matrix we have different variations of television and so on and so forth and all of these centuries of cinematography have been represented by few scrolls and if we have to make any conclusion here that will be like in our age we are overwhelmed of information we are scrolling constantly through different fields a social media website and so on so the power of scrolling it's a new terminology in web development and it's here to stay I've often seen so many websites adopting this approach and even me as a developer sometimes the only way I am able to represent a story is by using scrolling telling so the visitor needs to understand what the purpose of this website is and what the content of this website is in just about 2-3 scrolls quickly just leave them with impression give them something that will engage them and but not least make them come back the third aspect I want to talk with you is fluidity well nowadays websites are all about fluidity and all this animation that flows from right, flows from left, from top, from up from everywhere so it's the way how you are opening a new screen after another screen and you are serving the content that is on the website and I have chose an example for you here as well you can see how we are guiding users attention through the titles, through the images of course it's a speed up one but still get the impression and now almost my favorite part almost how we can take these ideas let's call them ideas and implement them into an actual code into an actual front end which is going to do all of these things if we choose to do choose to use them well here I have prepared a quick video for you and I would really ask you to pay attention on it because it consists of I think four websites each one of who is built on top of WordPress so these are WordPress websites they are super creative and here you can see the example with the big bold titles of course it's not necessary to use these we are not designers anyways but just as an example how using typography and colors can actually make the difference and you can memorize that website videos are also here to stay and it's a fabulous way to quickly choose the content of the websites super quickly and to leave the user with lasting impression that they're find out more information about the website super quickly again alright and you might actually started to wonder what are these technologies that we're talking about so much and how we can use them I'm going to review in just a few seconds and actually before let's call them libraries because they are actually libraries if somebody wants to share a library after that or even during the talk or in the QI session please be my guest so let's move forward and see these technologies that we can use to enhance and to level up our WordPress website well one of my favorite here is Barbara JS it's a JavaScript library which allows us to go through pages without reloading actually the page which makes first transitions between pages much more faster and it makes less HTTP requests which again leads to faster user experience also combined with other libraries can lead to super interactive screen openings next one is WebGL which I already know that you're super familiar with it it's a JavaScript API which allows us the developers to create 2D and even 3D interactions I'm pretty sure even for those who are not super familiar you have seen it into let's say Google Maps is using WebGL to create this canvas another library I would like to mention is 3JS which is again JavaScript library using WebGL to perform different types of interactions just up by green sock is actually my favorite and I often use it to create small interactions and also interactions that are engaged with scrolling so imagine as we talked a few minutes earlier about scrolling telling when user scrolls and scrolls you can review different elements and you can hide them beautifully so you can create a whole spectacle using it last but not least is Lenny scroll of course there are many libraries like locomotive scroll and you can find out more you can suggest also which are making the scrolling nice so you are not interrupted by shifting screens all the time but you have this smooth experience and now since we have this beautifully packed up front end with all the functionalities with all the libraries that we have incorporated mindfully it's time to bring this piece of art into a WordPress well how to do that I'm going to start talking a little bit about creating custom WordPress team which leads me to another question how many of you have created fully custom WordPress team from scratch that's great I'd love to know my audience a bit better well you may know and for those of you who don't know that in order to work properly a WordPress team needs to essential files and those are style.css and index.php but since we are going to create custom made and tailor made WordPress team that is going to serve to the front end that we have already created we are going to need a bit more files in here of course we have header.php which are going to be multiplied and used throughout the website but first before we dive into the coding part we need to do one thing and that thing is to make ourselves super clear about the content structure what do I mean by that well actually I'm going to tell you a story of my own experience before a couple of months I was working on a project which was about it was a website built for this biggest payment provider's export and we have the front end all packed up we have all these beautiful interactions, animations and each page was unique in its own way so we have truly achieved this goal to provide the visitors of this website with remarkable experience so me and the team we have decided that since it's going to be truly unique page each page is going to be truly unique we are going to use page templates and we have almost built up everything and we were like maybe two weeks before launch date and client calls us and says okay but we want to be able to tweak around the sections to move one on top of the other or to completely erase any of the sections and you might wonder well WordPress can actually do that it's all about tweaking and connecting and playing with books but since we are creating a truly customized team here we are relying on the user experience and on the order that each one of the sections appears in order to provide really engaging storytelling anyways we have started from scratch and we've built it, I'm going to mention how and what we did in a few minutes but first I'd like to start with custom post types I assume that lots of you are familiar with custom post types in here yes raise a hand alright so for those of you who don't know custom post type well actually I'll use an example Wuk Mercedes products can be called custom post type it's a way of organizing content and creating its own way to be rich like posts, like pages like products in Wukomers and so on so using custom post type custom post types can really elevate the content managing when it comes to because when you hand over the projects the client needs to know how to edit all of this content to give you an example a friend of mine which is a cooking blogger wanted a website and I was like of course we're going to build a website for you so we've built a website and it was all about recipes because cooking blogger well I've created a custom post type called recipes and I labeled it with several custom taxonomies which complements really well custom post types in order to organize again and to make it easier to filter it afterwards so for example in her blog she had a page called recipes and she has a filter inside of it and visitors were able to filter through dish type through time for preparation which is important also by needed ingredients and so on and so forth you get the idea here that you're so clear about the content and you know what WordPress elements you're going to use in order to combine all of this frontend then you can start actually building it and to go even a step further I would like to mention a few words about Gutenberg well again with this audience I'm pretty sure that you are familiar with Gutenberg since version 5 correct me if I'm wrong is the default WordPress editor well of course in WordPress core you can see a lot of prebuilt Gutenberg books but if we want to relate to this topic or how we can create customized experience well we can actually grab each one of website sections and turn it into a Gutenberg book and it was exactly what we did for this company last minute they said but we want to swipe sections or to erase them or to add two equal sections on top of another and so on and so forth so by creating custom Gutenberg's book you can implement your frontend or your frontend sections in a way that could be like Lego or like Puzzle for the clients to pick the pieces together and of course as almost everything programming Gutenberg's book can be created in several different ways I'm not going to fall into the technical details because we don't have that much time but if anyone is interested on how we can create custom Gutenberg's book feel free to catch up with me after the talk and since we have knowledge on how to create custom post type and whether we are going to use custom taxonomies that are going to complement this or extend this custom post type we already know that we might use Gutenberg's books and to implement our beautifully created frontend into the Gutenberg's books it's time to create page templates and single files well single files each custom post type has its dedicated single template which is responsible for the layout of this custom post type to make it clear let's imagine that you have a standard WordPress team and you have your blog posts but then you add a new custom post type and the layout for this custom post type let's call it projects for example it's pretty much the same as the blog posts but you don't want this you want inside of your custom post type for projects to showcase your recent work to add some screenshots to add some videos and these are elements that are not represent into the normal blog posts well in this way you can create single PHP file that is going to be dedicated only for the project custom post type and if you have wondered how with all of these libraries and heavy frontend we can still have pretty much faster page experience well not only by using Gutenberg but I'm going to give you this as a quick example well Gutenberg if you decide to have custom books all the scripts and all the styles for this custom is going to be loaded only if the book is present on the page so no matter if you have library of 100 books and if on a certain page you have 3 books you are going to load the scripts and the styles only for those 3 books and of course yes because speed matters and you don't have all of these crazy HTML markup that pretty much maybe each of the team builders world on the page and by this I want to wrap it up super quickly and to actually tell you that creating uniqueness and creativity can be done by WordPress and the only thing that can stop you might be your imagination or your skills but skills are something that you can gain anytime so dedicate time if you want to have a bit more creative and tailor made experience so thank you so much for listening alright everyone thank you thank you Peter so we have the questions and answers section and if you have any questions please raise up your hand okay I'm counting one who has the mic please okay someone is going to get the mic to you to ask your questions please we are going to be taking one question this is the first person we are going to be taking one question per person please you can always catch up with me after the talk raise it on I have a quick question how does any of this work with accessibility like if a person has accessibility issues how do they use like the long scroll telling site that you need to scroll you need to be able to see it thank you for the question it's a really important question because we need to make sure that web is accessible for everyone so when we are building the front end of our websites we can use best practices like adding data attributes so we can ensure that screen readers knows exactly where the user is so it could be buttons it could be sections it could be titles on the anchors so user knows exactly where they are and what they are going to open if they click on this so it could be implemented directly into our front end and to say that way it's in the front end garden to be done before starting with the team I hope that answers your question next person please hi thank you for your talk I'm assuming that you're presenting some kind of design to the client before you start actually start building how do you design or how do you present moving designs and what workflow do you use for that yes thank you for the question it's also a really good one well you know with this modern technology it's like even for example using Figma you can present interactions or you can use Adobe products as well to make a quick preview on how is it going to look at the very end of course not every client and not every website is suitable for huge animations you need to talk this with the client as well and you need to see which is their target audience at first and this is the most important thing and then it's all about testing, showing and communicating thank you so much for the question all right next person please hello and first of all sorry if you mentioned this and I didn't catch up but you mentioned custom blocks on Gutenberg and my question is all your front-end applications run in React app or do you also create custom blocks that render PHP and you use the PHP to show the front-end while the blocks are created in the React native WordPress yes it's also a very good question and as I mentioned there are always more than one way to do so the question is speaking itself so again it depends on the project scope and on the technologies we would like to involve into this project it could be done by native React blocks using native Gutenberg blocks using React and we can start building up the front-end according to the blocks that we are going to render at the very end but it also and it happened in my experience as well to receive already built front-end that it's not meant to be sliced into Gutenberg blocks so that way I use the second approach that you have mentioned and you can do this by using for example advanced custom fields it's also an option to create blocks with advanced custom fields so again depends on the scope and depends on if you're starting from scratch from the discovery phase or if you're receiving some really really beautifully assembled front-end and you need to quickly decide how you're going to implement it into WordPress thank you alright anybody else hello okay hi hello is this design approach effective on smaller screens as well or is it more targeted on larger screens also a very good question well again it depends on the target audience but of course we are trying and I believe it's the best to try to keep as much as you can but again keeping in mind that too many animations and interactions can be really overwhelming into a smaller screen so even it could be a way to just complement the desktop website with smaller interactions or even I have seen and even in my experience I have built such solutions if the animation or the interaction is too complicated you just guide the user even to rotate the screen either to open it on a desktop it really depends again on the project and what the client or the person you are building this project wants to achieve with it thank you thank you okay hello do you have recommendation for a tool that designer can use to present animation to developer so like developer can look animation, see the timing easing and everything else that we developers need to write in CSS and we cannot guess thank you too you just described a day of my life you know I believe it's a pain in the you know when talking with designer talking with the developer or developer talking with the designer because in my experience designers when they see the final implementation of their ideas they were like but I was not imagining imagining it like this what did you did and what did you do so to answer your question maybe it's a way of communication and it's a way of combining different tools such as Figma as I mentioned before I'm not a designer but I'm pretty sure that there are many much more tools that designers can use in order to provide information as clear as possible because even using Mae'r webosidun rhaid i'w gweithio ar fyny. Felly mae'r gweithio ar y cyfnod gyda'r gweithio ar fyny a ydych chi'n gallu'n unrhyw ddod i gyfnod gyda'r webosidun ar hyn. Mae'n gweithio ar gyfnod gyda'r webosidun ar gyfer mwyno ac mae'n rhaid i gilyddio ac mae'n gweithio ar gyfer yr adeith astii. Roedd ymddiembeithio mewn gwirionedd, ond e'n gweithio ar agor. Fynghor yn cael ei gwasanaethe? Michol! Michol! Ac rwyf yn fawr i'r不 cymddechrau, gallwn gweithio bod os i'r wapwyr uchel bwysig gan gweithio gan gweithio cwyrdiol. Felly oedd cuno ddweud â'r wapwyr uchel bwysig, â'r gweithio gwyddo i'r wapwyr i wneud gweithio i gael mwybwyr, gallwn i'r wapwyr yw'n gweithio cymddechrau, lle mae'r gweithio yn gwybod a'r cyrnydd o'r cerysel. Fawr ydych chi'n gweld i'n gweithio. Rwyf voldwch bod nesaf, ydych i'r hyn. Mae'r tél sydd. Rydyn ni yw'r heatedbynau cylinderol. Ond rwyf wedi bod o'ch ffordd iddyn ni'n ddif chi'n dweud pethau ei taelol i ddylch yn credu ffondig i ddod siwydd yma, allan rydych chi'n g beansol. Rydyn ni'n ddweud fydd o'n cyfrifiad cyffredin gyda mwyneid cystafol i gyfrifiadau i gyd yn ddeithas alimentur cael eu cyfrifiadau. But tweak with the details. If you don't have the scene for astonishing interactions, tweak with the details because it's in the details. Thank you. Any more questions? Ok, I have one. Thank you very much for the talk. I have a question about focus. If things move, you were talking about animation and transitions, and we all know if something moves, the people look to the things that move. So what do you do with clients that see now we can animate things and they want to animate or transition things that shouldn't get the focus because it's not the content, but some fancy images or things like that. So the user is looking at the wrong things because they should look at beautiful pictures, they should see and read the content. Yes, indeed. Well, again, it's more like when the designer and the client are talking about the final result they want to achieve and on which elements they want to focus users' attention. Because of course we can overdo it with lots of animations and interactions that are going only to overwhelm the user and will make them exit the website. But when user's right, interactions can navigate users' attention and to make them focus on the things we want them to focus on. For example, if you open, let's say, some e-commerce website, you see how the add to cart button is in different color, is in different size, it might use even different typography just to stand out, just to be different. And of course for e-commerce website, that's the main goal. We want visitors to became clients to purchase something and to finalize their order. So it's about getting clear idea on what is the main result that we want to achieve when a visitor opens up the website. I hope that answers your question. All right. Thank you. That's the last question we can take. Time is almost up. If you have other questions later, you could reach out to the speaker and ask her directly. I'm sure you have a more engaging conversation that time. All right. Thank you everyone for being here. Thank you. I run applause for the speaker, please. Thank you. OK. So we are getting ready for the next session. We have a few announcements to make. If you are interested in contributing, the contributing area, you have to, when you come out, take your left and take the lift to level two as well. OK. And what would be... Sorry? Yeah. OK. We quickly have a presentation to make. Call on the speaker, please. You want to give a little gift? Please, a round of applause, please. We want to say thank you very much for being here and for talking. I learned a lot. I have questions, though, that I would ask much later. Of course, definitely. Thank you very much for coming. We really do appreciate your time. Thank you. All right. OK. Remember, if you have not gotten your swag yet, please go to the swag table at the info desk and you should be giving your swag for World Camp. And then if you've lost anything, the first place to check is the lost and found desk. OK. And if you see anything, please, it's not find us, keep us. If you find it, please return it to the lost and found desk so we have people who would take it to their respective owners. And we should get ready for the next session shortly. OK. I think that's in 15 minutes, right? How many languages is WordPress translated into? If you know the answer, please go to the community booth and just answer them and they will take out the rest. Thank you very much. Tom. Kingsley. Yeah. Good afternoon. Hello. All right. You're welcome. We are about to begin session two. Shot that we'll be bringing on the speaker to talk to us about another topic. But before that, I just quickly want to run through some information for you. All right. There are lots of sponsors out there. You could see these sponsors make it possible for us to have this event. And we encourage you to reach out, go through the booth, see what they have to offer. Myself have gone through one or two of them. And have some of my questions, your boring questions answered. So I suggest you do the same if you've not. And while I did grab a few swag here and there, just, you know, it's all part of the event and have fun out there. In between sessions, feel free to network and reach out to other people as well. OK. There's a wellness track at level one with yoga at 8.15 in the morning. So if you are that kind of person, feel free to join in the sessions. There's also Tai Chi. And for those who are at that level, you should also join them. And that is a group hike. Well, that's one I would never join. My legs are not just cut out for that. But then it's good for those who love such kind of sport. I think it starts by six. Every of the events is a first conference of business. So please go there as early as possible. And once again, for those who are just coming in, my name is Kingsley. And this is the first time I'm at a World Camp. So forgive me if I'm not as fluid as the best MCs in the world. But we are going to be... Thank you very much. We are going to quickly be welcoming the next speaker. Her name is Laura. And Laura is joining us from the UK. So today Laura is going to be talking about freelancers' guide to client onboarding. I was myself a freelancer as well. So this is really an interesting topic you need to listen to. She is a designer and founder of three products. Client portal, design academy and project park. I am sure Laura was going to talk more about these different sites and the project and what they do and how you can also use them to benefit from them as well. So most plungid founders, she knew we were developers. And then as a designer with limited technical skills, it was a challenge in the early days. So basically what Laura is trying to do is to fill a gap and bring her design skills to bear. I think somebody asked a question in the last session about how designers and developers can work together to bring about the reality of a design. She is going to be talking a lot more about that. So sit back, relax and listen to that. Like I said, this talk is for freelancers. So if you have a freelancing business that you are working on, you want to listen to her, you want to learn the tips, you want to learn how to build your business and scale up from there. And if you have any questions, please just keep them. We have a 15 minutes window where you can ask your questions at the end of this session. And Laura will be happy to answer all your questions. So please, with a round of applause, please let's welcome Laura to the stage. Why she talks to us on the freelancers guide. Thank you very much. Hello everybody. Thank you so much for joining me today. I know there were a few really great sessions at this time. So the fact that you're all here in this one is a really, really big compliment. So my goal is to make you feel like you made a good choice by coming today. So like I'm going to be talking about the freelancers guide to client onboarding. Now I don't need to introduce myself because I just had a wonderful introduction there. So I'm just going to get right into it. Today I'm going to show you how you can design an onboarding process that wins you more projects, delights your clients and solves some of your biggest client headaches. So it's a tall order. And the presentation has three parts. So the first part, I'm going to really briefly go through what onboarding is and why it's important, just to get everybody on the same page. So really, really quickly go through this. Then I'm going to talk about the four things that make a really great onboarding process. And then in part three, which is the meat of the presentation, I'm going to go through an example of a really good onboarding process that you can copy and use in your own projects. So what is onboarding and why is it important? Well onboarding is basically the process that moves a person from being a lead into being a client. Now a lot of people see onboarding as just that part where a proposal has been accepted and you are getting the client familiar with working with you and starting the project. I actually see onboarding right from first contact all the way till the project starts. So I see it as a slightly longer process. And onboarding is really, really important. I think it's one of the most important things you can do and that's for three main reasons. First off, you can set expectations during the onboarding. You can basically prevent so many problems that freelancers have during the onboarding stage. Some of the most common problems that I get asked about all the time are things like clients who are micromanaging, clients who are, you know, there's scope creep happening where they're trying to get more things into the project that they haven't budgeted for. And you can prevent a lot of those things and actually prevention is much better than trying to fix them as they actually happen. And you can do that in the onboarding. Secondly, onboarding makes you look really good. So first impressions are so, so important. And how you start the project is really going to set the scene for how the rest of the project goes. If you start on the right foot, your client is going to think really well of you throughout the whole project. If you have a bad first impression, it's a lot harder to recover from. So it just makes sense to just try and get yourself started, get yourself the best first impression that you can. And finally, onboarding is a really quick win. So it doesn't take much to have an onboarding process in place. You don't need anything too fancy. You can get it done really, really quickly. And also the onboarding for every client stays the same for basically everybody. So it can just be, it's kind of like the low hanging fruit, if you like. So that's what onboarding is and why it's important. Now I'm going to go through the four things that make a really good onboarding process. Or really a really good process in general. So a great onboarding process should be useful. It should be reusable. It should be profitable. And it should be delightful. And what I mean by those is by useful, I mean it should be useful for your clients. So there shouldn't be any fluff in it. So if you want an onboarding process just to tick a box, you're doing it because you want your clients to actually find it useful. So if it's not useful, it doesn't need to be there. But also it needs to be useful for you as well as a business owner because as a freelancer you wear a lot of different hats. You're trying to do marketing, you're trying to do case studies and all these different things alongside doing your client work. And that can be really challenging. But you can bake into your onboarding process things that are going to really help you with all of these. And a really good example is something like testimonials. So a lot of people don't realise that actually during the onboarding stage is a really good opportunity for you to ask for a testimonial. You don't have to wait till the end of the project. And actually at the start of the project it can be a really good idea to ask for one because the client is really excited and you've made a fantastic first impression. You can also set the scene for creating a case study. So you can have maybe a questionnaire or something in place. So you can create your case study throughout the entire project rather than just trying to do it and remember at the end everything that you went through. So next it should be reusable. This one's pretty obvious. You want to reuse as much of your onboarding process as possible because that's going to save you time. You don't want to be redoing the same things over and over and over again. It just doesn't make sense and you don't really have the time for that. But actually I'd argue more importantly making things reusable makes it easier for you to delegate things out. So if you don't already have some kind of assistant I think that the onboarding getting an assistant to take over the onboarding for you is one of the easiest things that you can outsource. And I really think every freelancer should probably get an assistant sooner than they think. I didn't and I really, really regret it. I think even with a couple of hours a day having someone help you with these tasks that you put in place is just going to take so much off your plate. Interesting. Okay, well the other one was that it needs to be profitable. So this one's pretty obvious but like I said I talk about the process being from first contact to the start of the project so you want to actually win that project first and foremost. But you also want to bake in things into your onboarding process that can help you make a profit later on. So the thing I always like to remember is that every lead is a contact and even if you don't end up working with that client you should still be saving them somewhere if you don't already have some kind of CRM which is basically a database to store people. You should create one even if it's just a spreadsheet. And every time you do a discovery call with a client even if they don't accept the project they should be a lead in your database because as you're growing your freelance business you're going to be becoming more proactive in reaching out to people and you need a network of people that you can reach out to when you have different offerings available. And so baking these little things like this into your process that you can't rely on yourself to remember as you're doing it is just going to be really helpful for you long term. And then finally it should be delightful. So experience is really important and I think it's something that as freelancers we tend to forget. I used to work in a design agency an in-person one and we used to bring clients in and we used to give them spreads of food and show them presentations like with the big boards kind of like mad men's style and they loved it and they would pay so much more money to work for the agency than they would potentially have to pay a freelancer but they did it because they liked the experience and I'm not saying that freelancers need to do any of that we tend to work remotely so it doesn't always work out but I think if you can bake in little bits of your process you can bake tiny bits of delight it's going to really really help you and build those relationships that last for a really long time. So now we're going to get into the example so this is my sixth step on-boarding process and you might be doing a lot of this already but these are really the six steps that I would do every time a lead first contacts me to when the project begins. So step one, we want to first qualify the client and that basically means that we want to weed out any bad fit as quickly as possible because I'm sure we've all been there where we've spent time and effort doing a call writing a proposal and find out the client had a budget of 50 euros or something like that and it's really really frustrating because you just feel like you've wasted a ton of time so you want to get rid of those if you can and just pull through the people who are going to make really really good clients for you but the second goal really is you want to respond as quickly as you can so when you're knee deep in client work it's really hard sometimes to respond to these new leads that come in but responding quickly is so important because now I'm on the other side of freelancing I tend to hire freelancers more than I don't work as a freelancer anymore I tend to hire them and there's something about that first freelancer who responds to me that almost automatically shortlists them and back when I was freelancing I didn't respond quickly because I didn't want to seem like I was too desperate and now looking back I can see that was a big mistake responding quickly is a really easy way to just get yourself that little bit ahead if a client is potentially looking at a few other freelancers alongside you so this is what you want to do when a new lead contacts you you basically just want to have a series of templated emails ready to send out now I know there's a lot of information on this slide so don't worry too much basically I had to cut a lot out of this talk and put it within 30 minutes but what I've done is I've written down these four email templates that I think everybody needs as a minimum so we've got the initial response email where we've got five pre-qualifying questions to make sure that they have the budget they have the deadline and a few other things to make sure that they're a good fit working with you you have a template that if they do not pass that initial response and you think no they're not a good fit you want to have a really nice rejection template that doesn't burn any bridges because remember every lead is still a contact they might not be a great fit for you now that does not mean that they're not going to be a great fit for you one day in the future then if they are a good fit you want to have another templated email to book a discovery call and you know how that will work what the schedule is and then finally you want a templated follow-up email to just nudge them to book that call and I've got a link to download these templates at the end there's no catch, there's no I don't ask for an email address or anything like that I just couldn't fit them into the presentation so now we've done the qualifying the client let's say okay they're a great fit we want to work with them now we're going to book a discovery call with them and some people don't think discovery calls are important I personally think they are and that's for three reasons first off you're going to build rapport with people so we're working with people and I think any opportunity you can have to humanise yourself and humanise them and build a kind of connection is going to be really helpful I think in-person is the best kind of thing you can do for basically everything every good thing that's happened in my business has usually come down to some kind of in-person event or some kind of relationship that I've made as a freelancer in-person isn't often possible so the next best thing is to get on a call where you can see their face they can see yours and you can chat you also want to provide value on this call so show them how great it would be to work with you but without necessarily turning it into a consulting call so another thing that freelancers often say to me is they do these calls they're really really helpful and they're spending like an hour, two hours maybe even more just helping the client giving them so much information and they're super super pumped and then their client doesn't even hire them and they're so disheartened because they feel really really taken advantage of so when you're doing these calls you want to have them mapped out and remember that it's your responsibility to make sure the call only lasts maybe 30 minutes, 45, whatever you decide keep it on schedule so have something templated in your script, in your head for when you feel it turning into a more consulting call you can then push it to maybe say something like oh this is a really great topic I'd love to get into it with you even more let me send you some information about this package that I've got that could really help you and you can send them a package to book a consulting hour or two hours with you so that's another thing that's really important with the call and then finally you want to get all the information that you need for your proposal so I'll talk about this next but we're going to be writing the proposal immediately after the call so I actually think throughout the call really the most important thing is the follow up afterwards and the reason I think this is the most important part is because first off hopefully this is where your clients most excited but secondly this is something that no one really does at least in my experience even though it's so so easy so what you want to do is you want to do three things you want to follow up via email immediately just send one quick email that said it was so great talking to you I'm really excited about this project I'm going to be working on the proposal today and I'll get it to you tomorrow that's it and then hit send in my experience people don't do this and it's such a... it's so disappointing as the client because you don't really feel as valued and the next thing you want to do is add them to your CRM so I say this a lot and then the third thing you're going to write your proposal straight after the call while it's fresh in your mind and you're going to proofread and send the following day which leads me to step three so the proposal two goals here you want to show how great you would be to work with because you are saying I'm going to get this proposal over to you tomorrow you are then going to get that proposal to them tomorrow I think doing it quickly is really important don't make them wait too long because you might miss that moment that they're really excited and secondly you of course want to win the proposal so I recommend everybody block out time if you use Calendly or some kind of calendar scheduling tool block out an hour maybe just 30 minutes after the call to write the proposal and hopefully you've got all the information you need you would have a really solid proposal template where most of it is the same and you can just quickly add things that you need to throughout the process so you need a really good process for writing proposals don't put it off like I used to do just get it done straight away nobody likes writing proposals but make sure you wait sleep on it, send it the next day proofread to notice any mistakes and then send it so then let's say proposal gets accepted so we're going to send them the paperwork, send them the deposit send them the contract this one's super easy basically you want to get paid and you want to cover yourself if there's any problems so getting paid getting paid a deposit is another thing that I hear a lot that is really hard for a lot of freelancers most people aren't ready to work with their client right there and then there may be available a couple of months in advance but they need the deposit then so you can secure it into your calendar but a client is thinking well if I'm not going to start for a couple of months what incentive is there to pay now I'm just going to pay in a couple of months so I use this email a lot it doesn't work all the time but it definitely helps and there's a couple of things in this email that I think really helped it I can't start till May or whatever month but we can start working together now I'll get familiar with your business you can do some data collection homework all these things that we've got to get started so we can start working together now which helps them pay their deposit right there and then and then I say sound good if so as soon as the deposit has been paid we'll get going and then I add this bit at the end so I recommend paying the deposit as soon as you're able to secure your spot and you know like I said this doesn't work all the time but it does work some of the time especially if you have an expiration date for your proposal because then you can send a couple of follow up emails to that date to create a little bit of urgency you know you can say there's some there's other people waiting so your spot's going to go and you know you really need to pay it now otherwise it's going to be a little bit of a longer wait so the next step once we've sent all the paperwork and hopefully got paid is we're going to set up our working environment I like to do this as soon as the deposit's been paid and this is another reason that having an assistant is going to be super super helpful because they can do all this for you and just make all these checks to make sure that you are ready from day one to get going and really the goals for the setup is to preempt any common problems so things like can you log in to things you need to log into have they sent you a Google link do you have the correct sharing permissions all that kind of stuff I don't know if you've experienced it but I have so many times where I've been getting started I'm so finally able to start a project I try and open a Google link and it says oh you need to request access from the client and it's so frustrating because often they're not in the same time zone so I've blocked out this time and it makes me look bad right so you want to preempt all of these as soon as you can and just basically be ready to go from day one makes you look super super professional and so the way I do this is pretty simple I set up a structure of folders on my computer so I have I usually have three phases for a project this is for a website project where I'd have a discovery phase which is all the research, the homework I'd have the website this is the meat of the project and then I'd have documents and assets all those brand assets and contracts and all that kind of stuff in there and oh this slide doesn't work either and so this slide was a slide for a tool I use called posthaste but don't worry because it's in the link at the end I think I linked to it as well but there's a tool called posthaste and it's a free tool basically just allows you to create templates of your of your folder structures so you can just one click have them populated every time you get a new project so it makes it super super easy and then the other thing I'd recommend when you're doing this welcome packet is to just have a single or getting the document set up can't remember or working environment is just try and have a single source of truth for each client project so have somewhere where the client can go to access everything and this could be a Dropbox folder it could be a Google Drive folder it doesn't really matter where the plugin that I have is like basically to solve this problem but it's you know a portal plugin but you could use a project management tool or something like that just as long as your client has somewhere to access all those things whether it's a link, a file contract, the deliverables whatever it might be then finally the last thing that I like to do for my onboarding is to send a welcome packet and this is my favourite part welcome packets basically level expectations so we talked at the start about any common problems that you see cropping up throughout your project have a think about them they might be different for everybody but there should be something in your welcome packet that tries to preempt them before they potentially happen so if scope creeps a big issue then can you have something in there that says hey here's what to do if the scope increases in the project that's totally fine but here's the process and how we get this new feature added and quoted for and added to the timeline the welcome packet also helps start the project so if you have things for your client to do intake questionnaires or maybe they need to write the content for the website they can start that there and then finally I think a welcome packet is a really good way to kind of surprise and delight them because not many people do this and it just shows your client that hey you're a professional you've done this before, you know what you're doing and it's just really nice because a lot of the time the experience of working with freelancers might be a little bit might seem a little bit unorganised and that's obviously because freelancers are busy they're doing a lot but to the client it may seem a little bit unorganised so it's always nice if you are working with a freelancer who seems to just know what they're doing and they've done this before so I collect welcome packets because I love them this is my friend Franz he sends these to his client it's just basically some printouts of information about how he works and he sends them like this really nice little bar of chocolate to just welcome their clients into working with them I thought that was a really nice idea I also recently got a quote to get a garden to get a deck for our garden and they sent us this welcome packet and it had these things like the process timeline so a lot of the time clients don't know what the process of working with a web designer or a developer might be so have a process timeline it's got some success stories an agenda for the meeting they even have a little magazine they actually even sent us a hamper and chocolates and all that kind of stuff you don't have to go to that extreme I actually recommend most people with their welcome packets start with a google doc a nicely formatted google doc that you can change and edit and tweak until you've got something that really really works for both you and your clients is the best thing that you can do and you can then polish that up later on if you need to so here are some other things that could be included in a welcome packet because I'm short on time but you could have a getting started guide you could put your paperwork in there information gathering client homework any useful links is really important to maybe if you use I don't know Pinterest for collecting inspiration or something and then any handy guides so this is for things that if you struggle with your client doesn't give you great feedback could you have a little guide on how to give great feedback that you can really use and finally we want to use this as an opportunity to just build a little bit of delight into your process so I always like sending a welcome gift I see loads of people do this and I just think it's really nice you can send like Franz did some chocolate one of my friends I know he sends a book a really good book that's been really integral to his business he'll send that to his client coffee beans this is Lauren Hooker from Ellen Company she sends a gift card to a local coffee shop or a Starbucks and just with a note that says hey I'm really excited to work with you I know you need to write your content and that's really really hard but just take a morning use this gift card go to your coffee shop and get your content written for me and I just think that's a really nice touch but also remember that being thoughtful and building delight don't always have to buy things just be thoughtful throughout the whole process so always be thinking about how you can help your clients how you can build connections throughout be really really helpful and that's just a really nice way to be memorable to your clients so that's my 6th step onboarding process and basically when you're designing your own you need to ask yourself is it useful is it reusable is it profitable and if it does all these four things then you've got a great process on your hands so I would recommend everybody if you haven't already spend some time planning out your onboarding experience so from first contact it doesn't have to be as fancy as this just scribble it down spend a morning in a coffee shop in your favourite coffee shop buy yourself a gift card and just spend a morning or an afternoon with your clients down to the most minute detail and see the parts that you could template or make reusable and it's going to really really help you it shouldn't take a lot of time the emails I think are the most important things to template the other stuff you can do gradually so that's it from me thank you so much for joining me like I said I've got extras here thank you if you want to download them the link is bit.lywceu-le that's an L not an I but yeah I appreciate you coming and yeah thanks very much alright thank you a round of applause please that was great so I guess the audience they are itching to ask you questions because we need to get more clients and make more money so that's very important you have any questions please let me see your hands ok one anybody else two three and four ok let's start with the first person please so the mic thank you I'm Kevin Roberts by the way I noticed in the slide when you showed the email templates it seemed like you were using one of those automated template things do you use something like I forget the name of it yeah there's a couple so there's text expanded that's the really big one that's like super great so many features the one in the screenshot was actually one called A Text I've used both and I've switched to A Text A Text is so much I think it's like $5 a year or something it's really cheap you get a lifetime for like $20 it's really cheap and it ultimately does the same thing it doesn't have all the features of text expander but I really like A Text because it just does what you need it to do which is have these templates there so yeah there's that and now I use Help Scout just because I use Help Scout for my emails and that's got the save replies in there as well but yeah A Text is great and the text expander is really good thank you next person okay hello it's here go ahead you mentioned already uncomfortable situation when a client has a low budget how do you filter that in the nice way so client will not feel uncomfortable because you already starting speaking about the budget you know and you don't want to spend one hour and they have just $50 yeah so in the pre-qualifying email one of the questions is do you have a budget and is it over x and I think the budget thing is really difficult because we're often told ask the client the budget don't tell or show your prices which makes sense to a point but a lot of clients don't know what their budget is because they don't know what a website for example should cost so it can be really difficult to ask that so I find having is it over x amount is a really good way to just make sure that they're in the range or you could say is it between x and y or you could say websites vary wildly it could be anything from this to that does this sound about within your range and if so where about and that kind of gives them a starting point because I've been in the situation where I'm trying to get a quote for a project and they ask me my budget and I say I don't know like I don't want to offend you by saying something really low I don't want to say something crazy high in case you think oh there we go I'll just say that so I sort of see it from both sides so that's how I go about that then if they say no unfortunately I can't work with that budget I always try to recommend them elsewhere I might either recommend them to someone I know who could work within that budget range or maybe even just say you might need to try up work or something um yeah yeah you're welcome okay next person the mic please hi you mention you have a plugin to do all that right right sort of the plugin is it's really a place to store deliverables so it's basically if you have a welcome packet and you have all the different files and folders and links dotted around everywhere it basically just keeps it all together for your client so they just have one login and they can see everything it's not a project management tool in the sense that it doesn't do any of the it doesn't have any of those extra bells and whistles mostly because I found when I had project management tools my clients weren't using them so I switched to something a little bit more simple but yeah it just keeps it all together yeah okay alright there was one more person okay hi there how do you handle like clients slightly bigger maybe they have like an RFP or something where they want you to kind of go down deeper do you kind of put them into your process kind of work a bit around just maybe some stuff on there so with RFPs I don't I've never answered them personally because when I worked in an agency I learned and I don't know if this is just either maybe it's England I don't know but I found that with RFPs a lot of the time they already know who they are going to work with and they just have to get other quotes we have to get X amount of quotes from people and so you almost never end up winning them so I always just ignored them if you did need to do that I think to be honest it's a little bit out of my expertise range because I've never the only time I've answered one was when I worked in an agency and we had the team members available and they take like maybe a junior member of the team to work on the RFP and then they have it signed off by a senior member I think it's easier for agencies to do that route but I'm sure there are people who do it successfully I just I wouldn't actually be able to help much with that because I've never done it I'm sorry Thank you Someone read back please Hello How do you differentiate your onboarding process based on whether the client is like non tech savvy or whether someone needs to speed things up because they are comfortable with onboarding themselves meaning that I have seen cases that they feel the onboarding process is really slow because it's really in depth and welcoming for a non tech savvy person but they are frustrated just because of that and on the other hand if you try to speed it up it's much more difficult for a non tech savvy person so how do you differentiate it between these two types of clients That's a good question I think for my onboarding process it was never it was never too slow I think the only thing I would potentially do is if I had a really non tech savvy client I would maybe add in an extra call which would be more of a welcome call where I would go through the onboarding process with them so you know I would go through because I would send the documents and then it's really up to the client whether they read them or not if I got the feeling that this client really had never done the project before and I think one of the questions in the initial question email might be have you worked on a project like this before that kind of gives me an indication of how much hand holding they might need I might just like spend some time and book in an extra call with them and go through all these problems and how it works and go through that way but I would recommend probably having your onboarding process be really really fast and streamlined but slowing it down if you think a client needs it rather than having it really slow and then speeding it up if you feel a client doesn't need it if that makes sense thank you very much do we have other questions please okay good hi I just have a question about when you sent a proposal I learned actually two other tricks that when you send a proposal make a short video explaining the proposal freelancers and they were talking about actually presenting their proposals on a call in person I found that was quite interesting actually because it's not something unless you do paid discovery which is basically where the client pays you to do a proposal which for that garden design company is exactly what happened we paid them to do a proposal I'm actually very pro paid discovery it's just too much to go into in the talk but yeah I think anything that you can do with a welcome video is a great idea to just walk them through it or I'd maybe even change what I say and say maybe go through the proposal on a call with them and get them to commit to it there and then but that's not something I've tried but I can see it working really well but the video is a great idea because it's like a mix between the two it's not a live call that you have to do but it's not just sending a proposal and hoping for the best so it's a good idea maybe in the admin bar sorry? that's exactly it, that's it you saw the same thread thank you alright thanks I'm going to watch that again, that was great oh thank you do you have any advice on writing contracts and if you ever skip the contract completely or how do you simplify it enough for the client where it's not intimidating I think that's a good question with contracts what I did unfortunately this isn't available anymore so I can't point you to the link but there was a service where they well it wasn't a service, they had a contract and then they had a guide to the contract where the contract was rewritten in plain English that just explained what each term meant and I went through it and where you need to tweak it it was for freelancers Paul Jarvis if anyone remembers him years and years ago he did a lot for freelancers and that was really helpful for me because I felt like before I felt I had a contract that was kind of a standard one that I'd found but if a client ever challenged me about any of it I don't know if I'd be able to really say oh yeah what that was so I really liked having being confident in knowing what each part of the contract was for and why it was there that said with contracts it's really difficult because depending on the price of your projects how enforceable they are is I've never been in the process where I've had to enforce one and when you're working with clients in different countries I think unless you're doing really really big projects I don't even know if it would be worth enforcing it like if a client didn't pay like I don't know what you could do so it's one of those things where I think yes it's important to have a contract because you know it just adds a little bit of cover for you in practice how much it would help you I don't know because you'd have to get a lawyer it costs a lot of money maybe it would cost more than the proposal itself and it depends what you're charging I don't know if I would not have a contract yeah it's difficult I think that's just something you'd have to decide for yourself yeah you could potentially not have a contract and just go for it I think yeah yeah no worries thank you very much any more questions please okay have one hi Laura really great talk really enjoyed it thank you very much thank you when you come to proposals there's acceptance rejection and ghosting what happens with process do you go through when you immediately get an email saying oh thanks I'll be in touch and then you know like chasing it and we'll have you so you know what I mean I know what you mean I have I do have a couple of follow-up emails that I'll send usually you can kind of tell if they're not really going for it if they if you really think they're just ghosting you I would instead of trying to win them back I personally would try to get to the bottom of why so I'd say something like you know it looks like you're not interested or you found something else would you mind telling me why like why it didn't work out just to get feedback for me to know like where did I go wrong in the process I think that would be more valuable than actually even winning the project in a lot of cases because you don't always know like what you're doing you know you think you're doing everything right and you don't know what your client thinking but yeah the ghosting is is really really tough the other thing I would say is that's why the pre-qualifying is really important and hopefully by the time you get to the discovery call you know if your websites really good as well and that's going to help have your clients hopefully ready to work with you you would hopefully be fairly confident in the discovery call and then if not if it doesn't work out you don't want to have spent much time writing the proposal so it's why I recommend maybe like 30 minutes max to write the proposal after the call have it super super templated and a couple of follow up emails and then just use it as a bit of a learning experience and like I say every the way I just try to think of these things just to make me not too depressed when they happen because they do happen is that every call is another practice at a sales call and every person that you interact with can be added and they might end up using you in the future like it's not wasted as long as you haven't put too much time and effort into it it's not fully wasted but you can't control whether a client gets back to you or whether they accept the proposal you can only control what you're doing and giving the best proposal that you can and doing the best process and just trying to like get feedback on like how you're doing and then doing things like learning about sales learning about how to do calls and just keep practicing but I don't think there's really another easy answer for it unfortunately Yeah I'll exactly the same Just very quickly follow up on what sort of like time scales do you kind of go like okay I've not heard back in like two weeks or something is there any sort of time scale I don't have a specific time scale I suppose I would probably I think yeah two weeks I think sounds reasonable it depends on the size of the project as well though in the size of the budget like bigger projects bigger budgets bigger companies might have a different process that could take longer so it's going to be a little bit of trial and error you know if it's kind of a smaller company maybe you're just talking to the founder I would say two weeks is reasonable if it's a bigger company maybe you would want to find out from them what that process is for getting things like this approved because there might be extra steps you need to take it might take a little bit longer and all that kind of thing so yeah two weeks to four weeks I would say All right thank you I'm afraid that's all the questions we can take Thank you Laura once again please a round of applause that was wonderful I totally enjoyed that for you Thank you so much and we have a little token for you a little gift for you but first let's head about the text so they can take the mic off all right thank you everyone and that should be the end of the session but before you go quick information for you there's another WordPress session at the Trianty balcony you can go to level two to get there you should take a lift from track one and if you take you there so please if you want to be part of that session do head over there we'll be talking about five for the future how can someone become a sponsor contributor and how a company can do it and employ you to the WordPress project so please go out there and learn about that and discuss with the people there right okay so that will be all for this session we'll be garden again for the next session so stretch your legs take your time and just like I said get to know each other person next to you say hi say hello but basically the whole idea is for us to be able to be friends thank you very much Laura please thank you okay so please hello hello hello good afternoon and you're welcome to track three how is everyone doing this afternoon how is everyone doing this afternoon great okay so my name is Kingsley sorry if you're here before I'm just going to keep repeating that you will never forget my name after today so my name is Kingsley I work with automatic as a happiness engineer and I'm going to see for this session we are going to be bringing a very interesting speaker to the stage to talk to us about creating in simple words making money so Roger is going to be talking to us about creating monthly recurring revenue for WordPress agency owners and I'm sure even if you are not an agency and you are a regular freelancer you should also you could also learn from these and how to you know get a steady stream of income which is what we all want at the end of the day right so great so he's going to be looking at you know the past the present and the future so showing us different ways because he has seen it all basically he has run a successful WordPress agency and now he's the chief commercial officer for a cloud platform so that should tell you that he comes with a lot of experience as well so and then he got into the whole WordPress design through web design and but now he has moved on to you know present a WordPress as a software service and he's going to be showing us live on the different steps we should take and how that is going to come you know how you can start and actually launch something like right so with a round of applause please join me to welcome Roger Roger is from Netherlands by the way and please a round of applause while he comes on stage to teach us more about that thank you so now here on stage you see the Dutch guy explaining you how to make money so through Dutch fashion it is exactly what we're knowing about I see some people coming in I'm very happy that you're joining me here today I know you could have been doing other things like printing a t-shirt with GoDaddy or expanding your collection of socks for example I know I have so yeah my name is Roger I am indeed the CEO of WPCS and today we're going to be talking about MRR for wordpress agency so I'm going to step outside of the light for just a second and by show of hands who are the agency owners in the room please alright that's great thanks thanks for being so honest you can stay for the rest of the people I think it's pretty clear you can go it's fine now I'm trying to create a moment here with my peers obviously not all of you are agency owners but I think most of us are trying to predict our revenue I was just having a meeting with a very interesting other agency owner from Portugal and to be quite honest with you the reason I wanted to do it is because I wanted to be a digital nomad I just wanted to know how much money I would have in the next 6 months so that I could go to Thailand or Bali and enjoy my life building websites and so I want to start this slide by addressing the elephant in the room I'm obviously not talking about Vikas by the way he is not an elephant he is wise like an elephant and he eats predominantly leaves but I'm obviously talking about Shopify so Shopify I notice is something that we are not allowed to mention you know and obviously I'm not here to promote Shopify or sell you WordPress but I do think that there's a lot to learn from Shopify and we can only do better than Shopify if we can first learn what they do really well and so as far as I'm concerned and the way I look at it Shopify is what I see as the ultimate website as a service they give you a website and they pretty much sell you the whole solution and they provide value up front which I think is very valuable and something that is sometimes missing in WordPress it takes a while even if you're an experienced WordPress developer to put something in the site and then sell it to your customer and then they are like wow this is awesome and I think the WordPress community can actually do better by adopting a product based mindset so like I said you deliver value up front you wow them and then you go from there and the way that I've personally experienced how you can do that is by creating a website as a service so website as a service is quite simple I know sometimes it's a little bit confusing as per the definition but it really is you give people the total solution in an often standardized but very niche specific way in a way that they can onboard themselves and then you skill that up and that is something that I've experienced personally as being the best recurring revenue model for agencies but that easy or as planned really so to give you a bit of context as to where I come from this is what Amsterdam looks like during the pandemic and we had been an agency for quite some time we transitioned from a marketing agency to also include selling websites and at the same time we were building a startup for hotels and also our agency was surfing mostly gyms and restaurants and on the 23rd of March we were supposed to launch our app which is my birthday and on the March 17 the whole country went into lockdown so within a course of a week our entire business the app that we were supposed to launch and the agency that we were successfully running collapsed and you can imagine that to be a shock we were just basically way too shocked so we had to let go staff we had to leave behind the app somebody asked us today if we did something else with it we did we transitioned the app to help people get things nearby and it really didn't work but at least we tried what we noticed looking back is that we were mostly serving or building projects I love projects I love the fact that you can really focus on a project for a customer, look at it from all angles and then just absorb all the work and then build the hours but now we had a much smaller team and Mara was pretty low and we had to find a way to pivot out of a crisis and trying to find a way to do so some guy trying to give good advice said it sounds like you're giving away free nachos so more drinks and it was a bit of a weird statement but he said it in the context of you're often selling websites for a very low price so that you can then upsell services on the back end and that is exactly what we were doing we were very often just giving away websites for free and then upselling marketing services content and what not on the back end so now we were back at square one we needed to find a new way to scale up our agency obviously I still wanted to go to Bali even though it was completely forbidden at the time and we started looking at MRR generating revenue models and I'm sure you recognize most of them so let's talk about the first one development retainer model great model if you are a big agency already if you have the staff on hand that can immediately service the customer and then build those hours going months forward build some pipeline if you can also target larger agencies love that I actually see somebody in the room right here doing that Jimmy that's a great model didn't really work for us with a small team but it was pretty good when we were doing it at the time maintenance is something that I cut my teeth in and also cut myself with it's really fun if you're selling people plugin updates and then something goes horribly wrong I think we've all seen this year a fair amount of vulnerabilities with plugins and then you have to spend significant time fixing those so the small retainer model that you charge on a monthly basis doesn't cover all the extra effort that you then suddenly have to put in let alone the weekend spend because you auto set your plugin updates on Friday which is always a lot of fun I love it when hosting companies say you can automate your updates with us set it on Friday and then you can spend your entire Saturday afternoon not with your friends reporting one of the less scalable models that we thought was a really great idea at the time Sebran who's my co-founder in the back here he loves creating dashboards and he built a really really great dashboard metrics are his thing not so much for our customers though they often couldn't really understand what the metrics meant and so you spend most of your time explaining a standardized dashboard that perfectly and beautifully draws in all their metrics into reporting and then you have to explain what conversions mean or what top of funnel and bottom of funnel really is time spent on site how that actually leads to more conversions and you actually only can really skill that model if you have a sophisticated customer that seems to me and then my favorite for sure the least scalable model at the time obviously we now are all using AI to generate content even though we are hesitant to admit it but yeah I'm a content maker by trade I wanted to standardize the content I thought it was a good idea to just charge a monthly fee and then generate blogs and photos and videos and then you have scope creep because they want another video or they want more photos or they want a blog updated every month it all works and you can charge a few thousand here and a few hundred there but at the end of the day it's really hard to predict whether or not they're going to stay because you spend most of your time on the phone discussing or arguing with angry customers about what the reporting means or whether or not the hours in your development retainer really are amounting up to what you promised so we needed to shift we needed to shift that project-based focused to a product-based model and on the photo right here you see another one of my co-founders in the crowd, Baynon and I'm challenging you to pronounce that name if you're not Dutch and he calls me up about two weeks into the pandemic and he says to me we're probably going to be selling more websites right and I say yeah I'm pretty much pretty sure we have to because you know we're all stuck at home and he says yeah I think I'm going to build a platform that will allow me to spin up sites automatically and then let customers or users rather onboard themselves and then we can charge a monthly recurring fee and then as they qualify themselves because they need more stuff we can upsell more marketing services and I was like that sounds really cool but it's never been built before and he says now I have no idea I'm just going to build it and so the moment I slam down the phone I pick up the phone again and I call a friend of mine who has another agency and I say hey look my other co-founder has just pitched me an idea for this platform of really no idea what it means but we can standardize sites and it sounds like that's what you're doing as well in a very unscalable way you want to partake and before we knew it we were supposed to launch a tool for ourselves and it turned into a cloud platform pretty fast so over the past few years I've spoken to hundreds of agencies first because we didn't have self activating you couldn't activate your description yourself so you had to literally go through me and after because we were interested in the agencies actually building a website as a service and what I know from experience and from the conversations that I've had here is that of the few agency owners that are actually in this crowd pretty much all of them have considered the website as a service model at some point if only we could make it work so again the last model is the complete opposite of what most agencies are doing these days and I want to take an analogy that I borrowed from a friend Vito from Atorim who is solving a similar problem in a different way they're standardizing the collaboration and communication with the customer and we are standardizing the building of the product and scalability itself but he likened agencies with Michelin star restaurants I'm guilty of that I tried to turn every project into a multi-course meal and a multi-course meal is great because it is more expensive but it's also very unscalable I don't know if Michelin star restaurants are your thing but they are pretty much always empty and that's not because they are unpopular because they have very few tables and that's really what it is you have to spend so much time on the actual product itself and there's so much scope creep and your customers get so much more demand because they're paying for it that it's a very unscalable way of doing it and most restaurant owners burn out I personally regret never being able to eat at Noma I would love to on the opposite of that you have the product based agency and I honestly just spoke with an agency owner who has a similar idea of doing it but he's approaching every project as a product which means that he's looking at it from how can we create as much value to the user as soon as possible and I'd like to slightly adapt that what if we could just build one product one time and then distribute that to as many users as possible and then make it as low touch as possible so then you can truly offer more salty nachos and sell more drinks on the back end right so we started looking at other successful business models outside of WordPress and so we returned again to Shopify again we didn't want to do Shopify we wanted to be in WordPress but we did want to take the scalability of Shopify and then turn ourselves or rather our users into Shopify but using WordPress instead pretty soon we found out that three guys building a cloud platform is a little understaffed so we were fortunate enough to get Dexter on board he's wearing black in this photo who is also a very old friend of ours I've known these guys for 20 years so I can truly say I have a company with my best friends and we started building it now there may be some of you in the audience who are thinking hold on I know how this works I can also do this with a WordPress multi-site because I can just build a product and then spin up new subsites and I can even automate that with some tools and yeah sure that works for a while fair enough but at some point it is going to have some sort of scalability conflict if you're familiar with WordPress multi-site you know that all the subsites are in the same WordPress installation and within the WordPress installation they share the same database and the same file system they're also on the same server so as your file system becomes more complicated and you're basically sharing all the user data in the same database and your scalability is very difficult because you have one customer it becomes really popular and it basically breaks the scalability of all the other subsites on the same server that results in security concerns and technical issues and to be clear I'm not a hater I love multi-site maybe not for the WAS model then so instead we did something else we started looking at Kubernetes which is the dominant and scalable cloud infrastructure of SaaS companies and with it we were able to build a containerized platform and this containerized platform introduced something called multi-tenancy and with that we were able to combine multi-tenancy and work-press so now you've got the scalable infrastructure of SaaS companies but you're using it to scale WordPress instead so how does that work so we were able to identify three scaling challenges that WordPress has if you're using it for a website as a service first of all operational scalability we want to be able to do exactly what SaaS companies are doing which means we want to unify the development we're building a single product and we're distributing that product and then we want to continuously update and upgrade that product as we go and for that we need individual WordPress installations that are still unified in development so the way we do that is we combine the code so the plugins, the language files and the theme files we keep the databases separate that means that after we spin up a site whatever the customer is doing in the site remains there that's something that we can organize and therefore we have security we have scalability all right cool so we've tackled how we build and maintain our product so now we want to sell it we want to sell it fast how do we do it, we automate it so we build a storefront and the storefront connects to an API with the API you can sell your sites automatically it's just a WooCommer store you're selling products these products however are websites are loaded with content with plugins, with themes that you as an agency owner have configured because you know your audience you know exactly the type of service that you are giving that has been working for you in the past all you need now is a scalable way to build your agency so cool we have an API, we can sell websites automatically maybe we use it also to update our CRM everything works finally we do not want to mess around with servers maybe you by not not me also I hardly know what they are and I'm pretty sure there are plenty of agency owners here maybe except for Jimmy who also really have no idea how they work or how they scale so we're doing a containerized platform that results in serverless scaling so that I don't have to worry about that anymore cool so if you transition from an agency a project-based agency to a product-based agency and you're Dutch like me so you're focused on recurring revenue then you suddenly find yourself in a startup space and you can actually go the VC route and I was talking to a lot of other agency owners and product companies in the beginning of this week and one of the things that we can all agree on is that WordPress historically has not prioritized these models after all we're still selling yearly licenses and then a company like NitroPack comes along and they start charging monthly and everybody gets upset but we are actually providing the value we are actually improving the product why not be compensated for that and then we can thrive together so then the question becomes are we wazing sorry so in our case we wanted to be neutral in the beginning we didn't want to join with a particular investor that made it hard for us to partner up with other companies after so we went for Axel Springer which is a very big media company in Germany and another company that you might have heard of and after a while which is by the founders of Yoast and we were able to and by the way I'm not plugging Yoast even though they have a booth here at Emilia and you can actually pitch or start up there and they'll say yes on the spot so if you have a startup idea or you want to build a product within WordPress and you're looking for funding please go over there and you might find yourself with a new investor but you can implement SaaS methodology for WordPress and then start building products by your WordPress portfolio or you can build an actual SaaS with WordPress and that enables predictable recurring revenue and then we can all go to Thailand so one of the case studies that I'm personally very proud of and I also have a booth here at WordCamp Athens or Europe rather is Oliver so what Oliver has done is they've built a POS that is very much integrated with WooCommerce and based on that they call as Commerce Development Kit so they've built a total solution with a curated library store of plugins that you can use and upsell to your customers and the WooCommerce store seamlessly integrates with WooCommerce or rather with the POS and they've built out so many different products that are completely satisfied so they manage the infrastructure they manage the products and all you have to do is build the perfect site for your customers or if you're doing it for restaurants or whatever you need they got it for you and it just happens to be hosted on our platform so what is the big takeaway here why do I think that WordPress agencies should adopt a product-based mindset if we can offer standardized and accessible product it doesn't mean that we should do away with projects like I said in the beginning I love projects, I love looking at it from all angles but if you can sell sites that are standardized and they are completely ready their solutions you can give that to your customers straight away and you don't have to onboard them, they'll onboard themselves and then you can create sustainable MRR because they've got something that they can start using it's fair priced much lower than when you're selling a big project it's almost in the range of maintenance but a little bit more and then when they become more successful you'll upsell the services that they need based on the data that you're getting from how they're using the product from the interactions that you get with them but you start with the value first which is one of the big problems that WordPress currently has if you look at the churn that hosting companies have I mean we're looking at what 30-40% in the first month that's because it just takes too long before there's value in your WordPress installation and as I said earlier we're starting out but also the experience developer so then we find ourselves back in the WordPress community and this is where all of you get involved and by the way it was just said that I was going to launch a live product and I don't know how many of you are here to see me crash and burn but I'm not allowed to so after this presentation I'm going to go over to the inside WP booth to see me crash and burn there feel free to do so so what do I mean with the product based mindset for the WordPress community so what's so cool about WordPress obviously and I'm not trying to sell you this because you are already here is that we have this ecosystem of companies that are doing what they do best and then agency owners such as the few people in this room can actually combine that can implement that for their customer it's been serving for so long that they know how to build value for and then you don't have to do all of it but you can take what you need and then turn it into a product and so it lends itself as a perfect vehicle for a thriving ecosystem if you can deliver the value up front if you can stack it with whatever they need to solve the problem right now and they have less turn, more activation and you have so much less work because you're just developing one product right and we all focus on what we do most or love most and do best and so therefore finally we the WordPress community can do better than Shopify by focusing on our customer which is a niche right on this one single audience that we have been serving for so long and that we love so much instead of building this very big thing or doing this one single big project but doing this one big product and serving a lot of people at the same time so in light of that collaboration I want to finish this presentation with a bit of an overview of a way that you could do that so you I've mentioned because before are wise, elephant in the room or maybe not in this room hopefully and what they do is they launch short-lived websites right which it's a really well if you want to launch a demo right now they're launching integration with our platform that allows you to turn into WP into a storefront so you build a site with WP you save it as a template you create a storefront on their platform and you spin it up on a platform such as WPCS and then you can manage and maintain all your sites as one again I'm not allowed to show you that live but I think I've made my point and I hope that recurring revenue could be something that is within our grasp if we take the right approach which I hope you'll agree with me is product-based that's it thank you everyone and thank you Roger now we have 15 minutes that are about for Roger to answer your questions if you have any questions can I see your hands please one okay hi really interesting project mandatory question what about GDPR yeah what about GDPR like for all different websites you have like different builds like usually or maybe it's solved through like your method but usually like with each project there's different requirements to put everything together data privacy imprint and all of that and like it's your solution for that to cater to the different needs yeah thanks what's your name by the way Oliver all right so let me answer this question by talking about our platform as little as possible right which is kind of the beef that I have with multi sites because what you're saying is what if we accidentally or maybe a little bit on purpose share user data right which is definitely not what we want so let's just say you're building websites or you're building a product and you can automatically provision those so you have the foundations of a website as a service well one of the things that we definitely need to get in order is that those sites need to be separate so well fortunately we have built what wasn't going to mention our platform but we've built a way to actually spin up individual sites so they skill independently but they're also shared we're actually rather they're not shared they're individual they're isolated but yeah like you say you want to do that on in a data center in the region where you're serving it instead of in some shady country where you don't know what they're doing with your are you from Germany by the way great country for GDPR you should all host your sites in Germany you're not allowed to do anything and then second of all you need to have individual sites so that they don't interfere with each other but yeah no it's a great question it's very important thank you thank you very much experts in this hi thank you for sharing it's really interesting so what you're saying is like as they first come on they onboard themselves like we're automating and we're standardizing that framework so what I'm saying in this particular model is you're using it as your most accessible product offering so you have a product that you can deliver to your customers straight away they onboard themselves and you're standardizing that so you're unifying the development and the maintenance and at some point that portfolio might have a few outliers so it could be that they are so popular that they're basically just they require so much effort from your site or they just demand so many different resources and at some point they develop themselves into a project so the idea is not to just forgo any form of project but to use it as a platform from which your customers turn into projects and then become more dedicated more of a spoke so yeah to basically summarize your question yes you would offer them a product that is easily onboarded too easy enough to get started with sometimes by themselves sometimes with a little bit of hand holding and then at some point they might turn into your bigger customer as it were what's your name by the way? Josh Thank you Any more questions please Okay Please You can shout Yes To be able to make this sustainable as a business and where does Shopify fall down compared to the model that you're trying to incorporate and do you see it as lots of agency owners trying to do Asking me to compare WordPress with Shopify and now I'm supposed to sell you WordPress at WordCamp So let me maybe phrase it a little differently or put it in a different angle I think what we can learn from Shopify is that it's an all encompassing solution so one of the few things one of the things that I really admire or rather respect about Shopify is you get one bill so I was talking to from Yoast yesterday and they have a Shopify app and it doesn't show up on your bill you just get one bill from Shopify so you'll pay it for sure because otherwise your site goes down and it's an e-commerce site so you're not going to not pay it so that's great it's a solution it's all encompassing I'm not saying but I'm not saying just to make that a little bit more complicated that we should have an app store with some form of control or oversight from some form of entity that kind of just goes against the open source nature and the distributed way that we do things but what I am saying is that we can work together more by adopting that mindset and then this WordCamp becomes more about how can we partner up and build a product for the end user and not so much about abiding by some form of rules Thanks Someone at the back please Hi there Really good presentation Thank you so much One question that I didn't quite catch You have a product for onboarding a lot of new clients on a daily basis I'm assuming How do you handle when those become projects are they still on the same platform or do you kind of move them to a new environment where you can do more customization and kind of adapt to their needs Right, cool, thanks Yeah, that's One of my favorite questions because it's a question about vendor lock-in, right? Yeah, not only about kind of the flexibility that you need to add to the clients that have particular needs Yeah, so I don't think there's a company that can be the end-all be-all of anything and so the way that we've approached it is I hope in true WordPress manner touching WordPress core is less as possible actually we don't touch WordPress core at all so in our case if you take out a site, it's just a site you can use it anywhere else and so the way that we see it is we offer a way to productise WordPress but at some point in time if your customer is successful they'll leave our platform at least it always should remain your customer so that's a good job Okay, so your target audience is agencies primarily our kind of resellers Well, if our audience was primarily agencies then some of these people in the room wouldn't have much use for me but fortunately no a lot of plug-in companies are using our platform to turn their business into a SaaS so for example if you have a plug-in like an LMS or a WooCommerce store or you make marketplaces you can just SaaSify it straight away If that's you by the way let's talk after, I'm happy to show that Thank you Thanks Right, any more questions please Good, because I'm touched Yeah, we still have some time so one quick question for you What are the typical most common use cases you see for WordPress as a service? Yeah, I mean it's maybe a bit obvious because I've mentioned Shopify so much but it's mostly WooCommerce optimized websites So say for example you want to build a Shopify alternative we have many customers who have started to lose customers to Shopify and so what they do instead is they build a Shopify alternative but using WooCommerce instead or something else like NorthCommerce for example I mean it's important to have some form of balance because it's just ready to go and that's something that they offer that's the number one use case I see the second one obviously portfolio sites because it's usually the most accessible thing that people need is the first thing you think about but the thing I like a lot lately is LMS so learning management tools especially during the pandemic everybody suddenly became a coach and a mentor and a consultant so obviously we have a lot of wisdom on our fellow neighbor so yeah no if you wanted to build a SaaS that makes it easy to sell that set wisdom that's something that we often see as well Great so you would say that there are other niche that are not explored yet that people can still build solutions for For sure so when we built the platform we knew for sure that there were going to be use cases that we hadn't even thought of before so for example a ready to go podcasting servers I never expected that many people were suddenly in the linking bio industry or we have people building sites for what they call again dark kitchens you can say we have sites for municipalities that do something with ticketing I don't know I don't get into all of it but yeah no it's very wide it's very very broad anything you want to do or you can productise that you know really well and you think I can build a site for him I might as well build a site for all my cousins then you can definitely productise that as well oh great thank you very much thank you for we are grateful for having you here with us and a round of applause for him please I want to hear a round of applause please thank you very much alright this is the end of this session and the next session will continue shortly in about 15 minutes please just go over there so they take the mic off and then you can come back for your gift please okay great welcome to the final session today for track 3 and today we will be talking about taxes basically if I count the number of times I've had users reaching out to me and asking about why do I have to pay more than what the bill is why do I have to pay this why do I have to pay that now today we have someone who would actually be clarifying that for us and explaining how you yourself can be compliant and still explain to your confused customers why they have to pay additional taxes here and there on your website as well today we have Evo Evo will be joining us from Spain and he's going to be talking about how not to let indirect taxes stop you from selling online so whatever the barrier is that is stopping you from making money online on your website and your business he's going to be talking a lot about that now he works for a company that does that does tax compliance or really major companies and today he's bringing his expertise to reach out to all of us here in WordPress in the WordPress community for those people who might not have the opportunity to be able to consult him one on one because of course like I said it works with the top tier companies up there so today you have the opportunity of listening to a tax expert and it's going to teach you talking about a whole lot and how you can go about these things now in his talk we're talking about tax compliance specifically on selling online so and then how you can work with it on your WordPress site to ensure that you are compliant and you are not breaking any rules or any laws depending on your respective government so with a round of applause please join me to welcome Evo and as he comes online to take on the stage Thank you for the introduction so I'm here today to speak about indirect taxes and how you can use WooCommerce to comply with indirect tax laws First of all, what are indirect taxes? Just a fancy name of describing the taxes some of which are behind me here I'm sure you know a few of them in the US you have sales tax in Canada and Australia you have GST in Germany a Mirvert Stoyer in the Netherlands you have Beta Day and almost all countries in the world have these and they're called indirect taxes as opposed to direct taxes that are directly collected by the government you as a business owner get a great joyful job of collecting those on behalf of the government and that can be a bit of a hassle so I will explain exactly how you can do that I will cover how they are calculated how you can configure WooCommerce to correctly calculate your taxes what the limitations are because no tool is perfect and WooCommerce is no exception and then finally I'll talk a bit about conversion rates because that's a question that frequently comes up as it is connected to tax calculation so I work as was said in the introduction as the head of sales at the sales tax automation tool and don't worry I won't be pitching any of our products but we do get a lot of inquiries from people who start selling online or have a modest business and need help with their taxes and in most cases they don't need a tax automation tool they just need some basic consulting which is logical because taxes are boring let's face it and most people don't start a business because they want to deal with taxes and moreover there is a lot of foot standing for fear, uncertainty and doubt in the industry by sales consultants or tax consultants who are incentivised to do that because it will attract more customers and they can bill more hours by making it look more complex they can justify sending larger invoices so the result is that a lot of people don't really know how to deal with taxes and we see three archetypical ways of people who contact us who deal with taxes in an unhelpful way and the first strategy we often see is this one the ostrich strategy people who say this is complex what I'll do is ignore this old text all together, stick my head in the sand and hope it will disappear but unfortunately it doesn't and often they are close having an anxiety attack every time they get a regular communication from their local tax office and it's taking a lot of their brain space and mental space and that's completely not necessary the next archetype is the polar opposite of this one analysis paralysis people who want to know everything there is to know about taxes before they even make a sale or launch their business founders who launch their business in Europe and want to know exactly how their product will be text in different states of the US how the thresholds are in different states how to register once they hit such a threshold and it's taking up a lot of their time which would be better spent focusing on their product or doing marketing or sales and then finally geofencing people who are worried about how to comply in certain regions and then just geofenced their solution making it unavailable for purchase from for people from certain locations and that's a lot of lost market potential also not necessary I vividly remember the conversation I had with an influencer one day who was about to launch his online product he was based in Europe and he had a lot of followers in India he was really worried about what would happen he was convinced he will launch this it will blow up, I will have tons of sales in India and then I will have a problem so he was close to a panic day attack had already researched extradiction treaties between India and the country where he lived and this is also completely unnecessary because you can comply with taxes in four simple steps not easy always to implement but four simple steps where you are obliged to register in most locations there is a threshold meaning that if you sell for a certain amount only then you have to register for taxes in other countries such as Spain it's from the get go for example in the UK it's 85,000 pounds if you would be based in Spain you would have to register before you start selling and the way to find this out is by visiting your local tax office people are often hesitant to do this because they are afraid their head will get bitten off or something in general they are kind people and they also have information on websites otherwise you can consult with your local chamber of commerce and there you should also be able to find this information registration itself if you have the obligation to do so is usually quite easy you fill out a form and then you get a tax ID and with this tax ID you can start collecting taxes it's very important never to start collecting taxes before you have registered for in the tax jurisdiction in question because that would be illegal and then finally the fourth step you would have to file all the taxes you have collected so the tax calculation in itself is the most complex part because the tax you have to calculate depends on where you are based where your buyers based the type of product you sell the amount you've sold whether your customer is a business or a consumer whether it's a B2B or a B2C transaction and there are as many cases as we probably have companies in this audience so it's recommended to always consult with a tax advisor before implementing any of these configurations I suggest because you might get in trouble if you configure things the right way best case scenario is some paperwork worst case scenario you get paperwork and a huge fine so always confirm it and what I will do is I'll cover the US and Europe because I think that will be most representative for people here today and it's a bit dry tax calculation and we're approaching the end of the day so I hope you'll bear with me so the first scenario I will cover is how to sell, how to calculate taxes in Europe and you sell in Europe so I imagine I start a webshop in Spain and I start selling t-shirts so from the get go what I would start collecting and calculating on all transactions would be my local Spanish tax rate so if I would sell as t-shirts to somebody based in Spain I would calculate the Spanish tax rate if the person would be based in Germany I would also calculate the Spanish tax rate but there is a threshold you should be aware of of 10,000 euros for sales within the European Union so if you sell for more than 10,000 euros outside of your home country so in this case it would be outside of Spain to Germany, the Netherlands etc once I hit that I would have to register for a system called OSS and this is probably the only time today you'll see it where it doesn't mean open source it means one stop shop and once you're registered for the one stop shop you would collect the tax rate of your buyer's country so from that point onward if I would sell a t-shirt to a German consumer I would calculate the German tax rate if my buyer would be in Greece I would calculate the Greek tax and of course for Spain it would remain the Spanish tax rate and it's also important to differentiate between B2B and B2C transactions because indirect taxes are a consumer tax so businesses are exempted so when I make a sale to a business that is in Europe but outside of the country where I'm registered what I would have to do is validate that they are indeed a business against a system called FIS and if it is the case not to calculate any taxes so I might also have sales outside of Spain internationally if I would sell my t-shirts around the world they would be exempt from indirect taxes but I might have to pay export or import taxes or what have you if I would sell services B2B services are exempt as well B2C services you have to charge your local tax rate for those and it's very important to know for sure whether your product is B2B or B2C for example CO packages it's quite clearly a B2B product because no child is going to ask for a CO package for their birthday but imagine I would sell for example tennis consulting where I would consult people on how to improve their tennis strokes and I would not collect any taxes and the tax office would ask any questions and then it would say well it's a B2B product they would probably argue that given my tennis skills it's highly unlikely that any professional players would purchase my product so it would be a B2C product meaning that I would be on the hook for any taxes I would not have collected and then finally for digital products there are thresholds so digital products are things such as downloads SaaS products membership sites and there are thresholds around the world for that because countries if you think of a country as a company they want to maximise their revenue as well so they start taxing sales on consumers in their country from companies that are not based on them this is why they are launching digital tax laws and most countries around the world have thresholds you should be aware of such as Switzerland South Korea Australia and once you hit the threshold you should also register in that country and start collecting those taxes now if you are based in the US it's usually a single rate for most states some states have no sales tax such as Delaware, others have a single rate other states are a bit more of a nightmare because in the US there are more than 12,000 different texture addictions there are swimming pools that are in their own texture so you could be in for a treat depending on the state where you are in and it could be a bit more complex usually a single rate some cases however you have to configure many different rates and then if you are selling to other states there is this thing called nexus there are two types of nexus economic nexus physical nexus economic nexus came about a few years ago because there was a US Supreme Court ruling that made it possible for states to start taxing transactions on people who are based in the states from sellers who are not based there again to maximize revenue for the state and most states have since then launched different nexus laws meaning that if you sell for a certain amount to different states you have to register there and start collecting and calculating those taxes going forward typically it starts at about $100,000 for example New York it's $500,000 so once you hit threshold you have to register there as well apart from economic nexus you can also get physical nexus if you have employees or a warehouse in a different state it might also mean you have to register there and start collecting those taxes now if you are based in the US and you sell internationally if you are selling to the EU you can register for the OSS for the one stop shop system meaning that there is also a 10k threshold and from that point onwards you need to register for the one stop shop and start calculating the tax rate of your buyer's country so if I would sell downloadable products from the US once I would hit the 10k I would register for the one stop shop probably in Ireland because everything is in English and it is digital but you can register in any European country that you like and once you are registered you start calculating the tax rate of your buyer's country so if your buyer is in Greece the Greek tax rate of your buyers in the Netherlands the Dutch tax rate and so on for physical goods there is the import one stop shop with a value of €150 registration is optional but highly recommended if you are registered you already calculate and collect taxes on sales on goods that are valued less than €150 if you do not do that customers would have to pay this VAT at the time they collect their package so they would have to pay the courier or go to their local postal office and pay before they can get access to their package which does not make for the best user experience and will probably lead to some returns as well for goods over €150 that is not an option and if you sell to the rest of the world it depends every country is different so you would have to investigate on a case by case basis now how can you configure all of this in WooCommerce first of all you have to enable the tax calculation people sometimes say well I don't have this tax these tax options in WooCommerce you do make sure you check the box so you can start configuring taxes and then you have a whole range of options the first choice you have to make is if you want to input your taxes inclusive or exclusive of taxes I always recommend doing it exclusive of taxes because if you do it tax inclusive and the rates change you have to update all your pricing which is a bit of a hassle then you probably decide to calculate taxes based on your customers address because as we've seen in the cases discussed previously that's usually what should be done shipping tax also usually standard in most locations in some cases it exempt so you might want to check this as well with your tax advisor then you have an option to create additional tax classes which can be interesting if you sell products that do not have a standard tax rate because usually products that are considered bad for your health such as alcoholic beverages or basic necessities such as bread are taxed at a higher or lower rate depending on whether or not they are dangerous or a basic necessity so here you can create those tax classes so you can later associate products with them and charge lower taxes then you have to choose whether you want to display your prices inclusive or exclusive of taxes I would recommend doing it inclusive of taxes especially if you're in Europe in some places it's illegal to do it exclusive of taxes because it would mean that customers see a difference price at the time of the checkout and what is advertised to your website so in some cases it's illegal if it's not illegal the Europeans expect to see to expect to pay the price they see advertised if they come to their checkout it would be a conversion killer and then tax totals do that itemized because it gives the clearest overview the next step is configuring the tax rates you have to do that manually or you can also find a CSV online there are many different websites that publish CSVs with tax rates as you might know not everything you find on the internet is true so be careful when you upload a CSV file you found somewhere and also rates change so you should be stay on top of it for example Germany temporarily lowered their their vet rate after the corona pandemic to stimulate the economic recovery so you have to stay on top make sure to update your rates once they when they change and then finally you have the option here to associate the products with the different tax classes as I mentioned then it comes time to filing for every transaction what you should do is generate a tax receipt or an invoice which is basically the same thing because this is the basic underlying document you need and the first thing a tax auditor will ask for one day when you're submitted to a tax inspection and invoices have to meet a certain set of criteria they have to clearly indicate who you are as the seller who your buyer is the date of the sale an itemized overview of the product sold with a description of each the value, tax rate applied and a sequential number because that's one they need to be in a sequential series all your invoices because that's one of the first things they will look at to detect fraud and if you think you're in the right wrong place and you're not really that interested in taxes here's one takeaway you can use anyway from this presentation if you ever find yourself in an airplane and you just want to relax and the person next to you doesn't stop talking when the inevitable question comes up what do you do for a living there's no better conversation killer than saying I'm a tax inspector you also need to collect location evidence because if I would sell my t-shirts from a Spanish webshop and 80% of my sales would be outside of Europe and I would not have collected any taxes during the inspection they would ask questions right because they want to maximize their revenue and they would say hey you've not collected taxes on so many sales I would have to it's not a problem necessarily but I would need to be able to justify that the way to justify that is by showing the billing address of the customer so I would need to have the billing addresses for digital products typically don't have a shipping address and you can collect three data points if two out of those three coincids you've established a buyer's location in a legally valid way so the three data points that you can collect are the billing country of the customer, the BIC which is the location of the bank that is the credit card and the IP address for B2B transactions you also need to validate those and in Europe you can do it against a system which is being made available by the European Union you can input the customer's tax ID there it will then tell you whether or not it's valid it will also give back a check code that's very important you store that because a company can be in business today and the tax ID can be valid today but not tomorrow so you should store that and then if it's indeed a valid tax ID no taxes are applied actually doing the filing so remitting the taxes you have collected to the government if you're in Europe you have the OSS the one-stop shop which makes it very easy because you can file your taxes in a country where you're registered for the entire EU so if you're registered in Ireland and you collected taxes on sales to Germany, Greece and Spain you just pay the Irish tax office and they take care of the redistribution for you if you're in the US it can be a bit more complex it depends a bit on the state I mean if you're registered in many different states it's a bit more cumbersome because you have to fill out a lot of tax forms you have to fill out a different one for each state and some states also want a detailed breakdown because they have many different layers of taxes such as Colorado where you have the state tax local tax, city tax special taxes etc so filling out those forms can be a lot of work around the world it's generally easy it makes a lot of sense for governments to make it easy because you want people to comply and the way to do that is not to make it cumbersome but your mileage may vary in some countries it's still very difficult to register and file what are the limitations of WooCommerce if you use WooCommerce to calculate your taxes you have to make sure you keep your tax rates up to date as I already mentioned there is an add-on that WooCommerce has made available and you can use for that as well I haven't used it so I don't know but I assume it's quite good concerning that everything they put out is quite good if you sell for multiple locations that's not possible to configure so if you have stores in different locations that's not something you can use WooCommerce for there are the thresholds that I mentioned you have to monitor and that's also not available out of the box with WooCommerce and then finally the location evidence and the tax IDs is also something that you would have to use other plugins for now finally a bit about conversion rates because a lot of people are worried that when they start calculating their taxes on their checkout page their conversion rates will drop to the floor the evidence I have is anecdotal but I've seen many many businesses who are afraid of this happening and it's almost never the case usually there's no decrease or the decrease is almost statistically insignificant if you sell physical products you have to start you need the billing address shipping address of the customer so it's not something that will complicate the checkout digital products you have the location evidence you can collect so it's also not that conversion the only thing you should be aware of is the tax inclusive versus tax exclusive because if you sell in Europe and you start adding taxes on the price of the checkout it could be or it would be a conversion killer for sure in the US people are quite used to it so that brings an end to this presentation it may sound a bit overwhelming after all the information I mentioned I suggest if you feel overloaded start with your business where you're based what you have to do to comply and forget about all the rest and now we have plenty of time to answer all your questions so thank you very much thank you very much that was really interesting I learned a lot I have one question I'll get back to the audience anyone have any questions about taxes okay the mic please hi Evo thank you we are neighbors I'm from Portugal from Spain right and this is about when selling in the EU physical goods regarding the location of the tax so you mentioned the billing address but I've been heard from tax advisors the shipping address so for instance if I have a shop in Portugal and I have someone buying from me from Spain but they want me to deliver in France where are the tax collected you take into account both the shipping and the billing address so you calculate it based on where you ship from and for that you typically take the shipping address so where you ship from and the customer is the billing address so your shipping address so where you ship from and where you build a customer to where they are built yeah the billing address alright thank you another question please Mike thank you as well so the people give me an address a prepaid credit cards and I have to trust them do I have to have technical measures to verify a location yeah so officially you need two coinciding data points to establish the location in a legally valid way PayPal already gives you the billing address so you will have that I would recommend also collecting the IP address and then if those two coincide you have established a location in a legally valid way if it's not the case and you have the doubt you can always connect with a customer and ask them to make sure you apply the right text thread okay thank you alright thank you very much any other questions okay I'm not seeing any hands so I guess that's all from the audience I have one question though now as you mean there are two things that are inevitable say rain and tax basically right so let's say someone it's not really aware about the whole tax scenario and stuff and then doesn't file it properly doesn't collect the right taxes from the previous sales and all that what are the implications for that business and for that individual well if you don't collect the right text thread you don't you have not collected them right historically you can get in trouble if you get the tax wallet so the government knows you're registered right you're registered as a business you've made these sales so they will ask for a list of all your transactions and if they find out you have not collected your taxes you could you could get a fine oh okay good just wanted to know about that but it's good you were asking for a friend right next question it says is it really necessary to register for tax collection if you hit the threshold in a foreign country so if I'm in a different country but I sell to maybe an external country and then I hit the threshold there is it still necessary yeah so if you sell for example digital products and you sell them around the world some countries have a zero rate threshold meaning that if you sell 110 euro e-book you should already register officially and start filing your taxes there no tax advisor will tell you this but I'm not a tax advisor so I can say it I recommend being pragmatic about it it's like if you walk to the center of the city you walk home 3 o'clock in the morning there's no traffic whatsoever nobody on the street you come across a red pedestrian light a red traffic light what do you do right if you're like me nobody's coming so you cross but that does not mean it's legal because the law does not say you cannot cross a red traffic light unless at 3 o'clock in the morning you're walking by yourself there's no traffic coming etc so if a police officer sees you you can get a ticket and I think it would even be right to get a ticket because if a police officer sees you it means you did not look carefully before you crossed or you did see the police officer it would be a bit disrespectful so the same for Texas it would be pragmatic I mean if you have to pay 1,000 a year and need a local fiscal representative to file 100 euros in Texas it does not make a lot of sense but it also does not mean you cannot get in trouble but if you do get in trouble I think as an entrepreneur you have a really big PR opportunity there as well to exploit thank you very much we have another question just a minute thank you for all the information I just wanted to double check this 10k threshold in EU also applies for services for example I have a service provided from Greece in whole Europe and I reached the 10k from clients from Luxembourg let's say anywhere do I need to register yes but typically services are B2B so I assume you're B2C so normally you need to okay thank you and just to make sure because I think she has if you reached the 10k for example in Luxembourg correct me if I'm wrong but it used to be per country but now the 10k are all over Europe so you do not need to reach 10k in Luxembourg you need to reach 10k in Europe period so it's really fast outside of your home country if you sell in Greece and you sell for if you sell 2000 to Spain 5000 to Luxembourg you got to register alright thank you very much any other question I guess that is it and we've come to the end of this talk so I want to say a big thank you to Ivo for coming and giving us this enlightenment and helping us understand better about taxes like I said two important things, rain and tax you cannot avoid them so a round of applause for our speaker please thank you alright thank you very much so Ivo just head over to the tech guys and then we can take the photographs okay so this is the end of day one please note that we are meeting tomorrow there's going to be talks, panels and WordPress connect sessions as well if you are doing yoga remember it starts by 8.20 and if you are part of the hiking group it starts by 8.20 6.20pm definitely then remember you have we have launch points at different corners we have different areas you can get hydrated or something like that you can see a different point and just help yourself and I will say again please network as much as possible and reach out thank you everyone and God bless