 I started my slideshow with this instead of my normal slide which is just an introduction. Do me a favor and just read that for a minute. This was written by a woman who created a blog to write about her daughter. Her daughter was in her late teens and got sick and died. She took to writing on the internet as an outlet. Just let fly, let things out. After a while, people started emailing her and saying, I'm in a similar situation or I have this problem. What do I do? Asking her advice and she said, I don't know. I've not been in your situation. She started posting things to her blog that people had written her usually anonymously because there were things that could have gotten them beaten or killed if their family had found out or things like that. I met this woman online and I asked her if she would be willing to come to WordCamp, and she said she would try but she lives in Delhi which is a long way away. She couldn't make it. But this story has stuck with me over time. I asked her to write for HeroPress and she said no. She was a little too shy of her English. I asked her if I could write about her and she said yes. And I haven't yet. It's in draft. I'm working on it. I asked her if I could talk about her and her story here and she said yes. So this is the kind of story that we're going to talk about today. Chrome puts up a message there. So Freedom of the Press is guaranteed only to those who own one. This is where WordPress comes in. It's where the internet really comes in. People got the voice to speak out and publish to the world on the internet before WordPress came out. But WordPress has really made it a lot easier. And it's hard to understand in America how amazing it is to have a voice that speaks to the world because it's easy for us to say things. It's easy for us to save up a few bucks and put an ad on TV or the radio or even on the internet now. But there are a lot of places in the world where it's hard to say things either because it's actually technically difficult or because there's fear of retribution. Something that's not in my slides because it just happened the other day. Somebody filled out the form on HeroPress.com to do a HeroPress essay and he said I'm from Turkey. And I blog and I build websites and I've had a really hard time blogging because the government keeps taking down my stuff. And when the coup happened, my entire server disappeared and I don't know what happened to all my stuff. It's just gone. We don't think about that here. I mean, there's a lot of servers in Southern California and when California falls into the ocean, you're going to lose some stuff. But it's probably all backed up somewhere. We don't worry about people with guns showing up and saying you have to stop saying what you're saying. So this talk is about HeroPress, which tells the stories of WordPress. How many people have never heard of HeroPress before this weekend in this talk? Okay, a few. That's actually kind of heartening to see how many people have heard of it. HeroPress came out of a conversation with a young man in India who was working for a WordPress agency. He had been a freelancer and he got together with some freelancer friends and they made it an agency. And they were really struggling to get quality contracts. As freelancers, they had been working through sites that list jobs. And most of those jobs that they had been taking were for low dollars. And they found that they ran into the stigma of being an Indian agency means you work for cheap and the work is not really that great. And they were excellent. They were good. But they just couldn't get work. So he asked me, what do I do? How can I do better in business? And I thought, man, I'm not very good at business. And I don't know anything about business in India. But I wanted to help him. So I thought, who would know about business in India? Well, probably somebody who has built a successful business in India. So I asked some friends and they said, well, have you talked to the organizers of WordCamp Pune? They run a WordPress agency. I said, no, no, that's great. Let me connect them. And they connected and exchanged advice. And I thought, wow, that's great. If I could figure out a way to connect other people that way to find someone with a need and then find someone who has overcome that need and put them together, that would be fantastic. I'm not going to tell the whole story because it's really long. But we were going to make videos. It would be like TED or TEDx. And that didn't work out. And so we moved to a text-based solution. And it's technologically, it's just a blog. It's just a blog. But I curate the essays. They come from other people. Only occasionally do I write on hero press. And originally it was going to be talks from people on the fringe of the WordPress community. People who are not part of the Western world, as it were. And it occurred to me that, and I started to think of it as people on the fringe of the community. And it occurred to me that, in many ways, everybody's on the fringe of some community. In technology, there are far more men than women. And so at some level, women are inherently on the fringe of the WordPress community. Just because there are far fewer of them, they have a smaller voice. They have less opportunity to, I don't know, rise up and impact the world, I guess, as a group. I thought for a long time I probably would not have a white American male. Because they sit at the top of the privilege pile, right? But my friend Kyle grew up in a very rural community with a relatively poor education and very poor prospects for a job in life at all. And he got into WordPress and built something. I said, man, you need to write to every other American and say, you know, there's a way here. You can do this yourself. You can make this happen. So HeroPress always has been and will always be about people imparting wisdom and inspiration to their peers. And they get to decide who their peers are. When I asked someone to do an essay, I tell them you can write to other people in your city or your age group or your gender or whatever. The message belongs to the person and I want them to give the message to the person that they think needs it. So where did you come from? What did you overcome? Write to yourself five years ago because there are a lot of people out there who are just like you and want to know how to overcome what you did to grow the way you did, to move the direction you did. Freedom, I've noticed, has become a common theme in HeroPress essays. So this talk was going to be the stories of the people of HeroPress. So I'm going to tell you some stories today. And the first one is Anonymous in Pakistan. This is a young woman who wrote to me three weeks ago and she said, I live in Lahore, capital city, and I am a lesbian and that is against the law here. And so if it's possible, I would like to do mine anonymously because if I give out my name, I could be killed. She had to leave college. She cannot get a job. And so she got into WordPress somehow. I don't know yet. I haven't seen her story yet. She got into WordPress and she works from home and she makes a good living and she doesn't have the fears of working with people who are going to hate her, throw acid in her face, try and kill her, whatever. Samir Bekhara is from Lebanon. He's from a very small city and he said 95% of the people in his city are his direct relatives. It is a family that grew into a city. It's just one of those Middle Eastern families that just grew and stuck together. And like I said, it's a small town. It's not a big city. And they do what their ancestors have done for years. I mean, they build stuff, they make stuff, they export, they import. And he got into technology and he learned about WordPress and he started building websites for the people in his city and then the people in his country and now he builds websites for people outside his country. And he's pretty alone. There aren't other web developers in his city. And so his sense of community in the WordPress community is very limited. He doesn't go to word camps. He can't go to word camps. There are no meetups. And so being on Slack has been helpful. He's really into LinkedIn, which surprised me. I don't know anybody else who's really into LinkedIn, but it was inspiring to see him being able to make a living that way, living where he does. Dunbosa from Nigeria. He's actually here this weekend. Is he in the room? No. Oh, yes, in the back. He's making a living with WordPress. I actually don't know the size of the WordPress community there. I know a couple of other web developers in Nigeria, but he's able to make a living, make a business out of nothing. I mean, what is WordPress? It's nothing. It's code. You download it and you magically make things. Carl Alberto from the Philippines. He lives close enough to the center of Manila that he can see it. He lives on a hill. He can see the center of Manila. It takes him three hours to drive there, three hours to drive home. So he got into WordPress and immediately got a job downtown, which was terrible for his family. He spent six hours a day in a car. And he said, there's got to be a better way. And so he found a job with a company in Finland. And now he stays home with his kids and spends six hours a day with his family instead of driving. Ayla View. She kind of trolled me. It took me three months to figure out that wasn't her real name. She's from Japan. She lived right near Fukushima with her boyfriend. And they were already working with WordPress. They were building themes, niche themes specifically related to athletic teams. And the earthquake hit and things fell apart. And her boyfriend was not working at the time and they said, you know what? Let's get out of here. And they moved to Australia because they could. They had the money. You know, I said he wasn't working. He was working with her. They were working together to build this company. And they just moved. They just left because WordPress allowed them to just pick up and go. Rocio Velivia works for Automatic, actually. She's from Spain, but she currently lives in Greenland. Anybody ever been to Spain? Is it warm there? Anybody ever been to Greenland? It's not warm there. But her husband got a job in Greenland and a way they went. And she is able to just pick up, take her job and go. And no one cares because she can work from anywhere. Kayla Jenkins Medina from Belize. She's a young mother. She works in a bank. She's a teller. Every morning she gets up. She feeds her kids. She goes to work. She comes home at lunch. She feeds her kids. She goes back to work. She comes home at supper. She feeds her kids. And then all evening long, she sits in the couch next to her husband and builds WordPress sites. And she is working to change her family's entire life. She doesn't want to get up and go to work every day and leave her family. And she's building a company. She is making money. And she's getting closer every day to not going to the bank every day and being home with her family. Robert Chiluca from Malawi. His essay is the one most recent right now. And I would appreciate it if you'd go read it sometime. This one really meant a lot to me. Before he wrote to me a couple of weeks ago, he had never spoken to anyone else in the WordPress community. He's been running a WordPress agency for two years. And he never spoken to anyone else in the WordPress community because he felt ashamed of his country, of the way technology works there. Malawi is the poorest country in the world. And there is no way in Malawi to buy things online. The closest you can get is PayPal. And you can only use PayPal if you have a credit card. And Malawian banks don't give out credit cards. So no one has PayPal. And that's it. There's a company called Payoneer, which is intended specifically to help with that. And they're popular in Nigeria and Senegal and other countries like that. But they're not in Malawi. There's nothing there. And so every time he gets online to look for help with a coding problem and he finds a tutorial that says sign up here for $10, he's out. Every time he wants to download a plugin to accomplish a goal and it says it's only $65, he's out. The average monthly income in Malawi, monthly income is $110. Think about that the next time you go look at a plugin shop and every plugin is $45, $65, $85. There's just no way. So he makes his living making websites for local companies who can pay him in local currency. I figured it out. It's like $45 is like $72,000. Kwaka, I think they use, which is inflation that just boggles my mind. Poor station in the world where he can't buy anything. For two years, he's had a business, a company, supporting himself, supporting family members. And that's amazing to me. There are some people who are too shy to tell their own stories and these people sometimes don't make it to hero press. Sima Tijasweidrao is the woman who wrote that quote, that post at the very beginning. She doesn't have a problem with people knowing her story but she doesn't want to, she doesn't want to be the one to tell it. Sunny Luthor from Pune is a young man who's actually quite wealthy. He built something for Facebook and made a lot of money and now he does not work. So what he did, he went to the candy store every day and bought candy and there were kids outside who never got candy. They begged every day. So he bought them candy and it made him happy, made him very happy and he thought, man, how about other people would like to be happy too? So he built a tool with WordPress where people can log in and buy candy. So he takes the money, he buys the candy, he takes a picture of the kid with the candy and sends the picture back to the person who bought it. And we're talking micro-transactions. We're talking 35 cents here. He's not making anything. It brings him joy to facilitate this. So I did a post on hero press about him. He didn't want to write about it. He said, you know, if you want to tell people that's cool. I'm going to be over here giving out candy. Some people can't tell their story. Nashwan lives in Yemen. I don't know if you've been watching the news, but Yemen's been at war for a long time. I worked with Nashwan at X-Team for about three weeks. He was in college at the time and realized that he couldn't do college and work at the same time. So he went back to school. And at the time I said, hey, you know, were you right? And he's like, oh yeah, that'd be great. I'd love to write. And then I didn't hear from him and I couldn't get a hold of him. And the war started and he wasn't responding to anything. I thought maybe he's gone. And probably six months ago I heard from him on Facebook. And it turns out he's living in a small home with a lot of people in the hills hiding out from people who want to kill him. And you know, we talked a long time. I asked him tons of questions. And I said, do you still want to write? He's like, I can't write. I can't do it. He hasn't worked in WordPress in a year and a half because he doesn't have a computer. He doesn't have electricity. I hope someday he is free again and can do things and maybe tell a story. But right now he can't. Anonymous in Chicago. And actually there are a lot of anonymous people who said I can't tell my story. I can't say it. People who've come through terrible circumstances and rebuilt their life with WordPress. Something I've learned is that stories impact everyone they touch. This top quote here is from a hero press contributor. And she found that writing her story changed herself dramatically. It changed her view of life. It changed how she lived every day. Just writing it. Just unloading, getting it out there. Changed everything. The middle quote is from me because I am quite sure that no one in the world has been more changed by hero press than me. Every story I hear, every conversation, every essay has behind it a one or two or three hour conversation about where they've been, where they're going, dreams, goals. And some of them are hard, some of them are just brilliant, some of them are joyous. Came to me a few months ago and said where is the donate button on herobus.com? I need to give you money. I said there's no button. There's no money. I mean I'm not... I wouldn't know what to do with money if I took it. And he said well, I have this money and it needs to go to you. And I said well, I'm going to work camp Europe. You could help out with that. And he's like sure, and he mailed me money. And this is his quote. He owns a WordPress agency. He is at the top of the heap. He's making lots of money. And he's building big elaborate websites for really high dollar companies. HeroPress is what nails him to the ground and makes him realize that WordPress is more than $100,000 contracts. It's more than... I'm sorry, I said HeroPress. WordPress is more than $100,000 contracts. It's more than sponsoring or making a living for your own family. It's more than providing for all your employees. WordPress is for everyone. For everything. Life isn't about software. It's about people. It's about love and joy and pain and sorrow. It's about communication. It's about being human together. It's about us. WordPress helps people make stories and HeroPress tells those stories. That's my last slide and I have like two minutes. But I want to say, right now HeroPress is just a blog. It's essays that come out every Wednesday. They're good stories. They're good stories about other people. People who are different from you, different from me. And about how they change their world. And I'd appreciate it if you'd go read them. Because I think it could make everybody a bit better. Question. Hey, Tofer, first of all, I want to say thank you for doing this. Because I honestly think that this is one of the best projects within the community. So, Kudos. Thank you. Second, my question to you is, how would you like to see HeroPress grow in the future? I get that question a lot. So, oh, she was on the mic. You probably heard. How do I want HeroPress to grow? I think about this all the time. And I come up with ideas all the time. And there are a few ways that I know I want it to grow. There are a million ways that I think maybe I want it to grow. I've always wanted to have it be multilingual. But that's a personal goal. I've had a lot of people who are not English speakers say, nah, don't put your work there. Put your work somewhere else. So, I listen to those people. But it still might happen someday. Because I think it's a great idea. An idea that I've had recently is trying to put together a bundle of software and services from common and popular companies and giving it away quarterly to someone who applies for that scholarship. Somebody like Robert and Malawi get a lifetime license for mainstream paid plugins and not have to worry in the future about whether or not he can afford that. So, that's one idea I'm excited about. Can I follow up on that? What's that? Can I follow up on that, please? Sure, yeah. So, if people are asking to send you donations, can you not tell them to put those donations towards something like that, a scholarship? Possibly, yes. I have been thinking that I would go to the people who sell these plugins and have them give them away so the money wouldn't necessarily need to go there. Yeah, money's been a weird thing with WordPress. I have a little bit of sponsorship right now from XWP which I appreciate very much. But I don't know exactly what to do with it. Next question. Hey, Tofer. I just wanted to say I remembered the original Kickstarter when this was all just an idea and... I can't see. Who are you? Kevin. All right. Hey, Kevin from WordPress. Just wanted to say I remembered it being a really kind of silly debate about the word hero and whether we consider ourselves heroes and seeing what you've done is just like... It makes that seem so trivial. Thanks. So, I wanted to say if you're up for doing it again or if you need help, give it another shot because I think you have the proof now. All right. Thank you. Thank you for the support. Yes. Oh, for Leah Foster. So, how do you live? All right. The question is if I'm not making money from HeroPress, how do I live? HeroPress takes about five hours a week and I do that on my own time. So, to live, I have a day job. I build websites with Modern Tribe. I will probably build websites for the rest of my life for somebody or other. So, you know, I just make money other ways. So, you're employed. I am employed. This is a hobby. Yep. This is my hobby. Sure. Yep. Thank you. Mm-hmm. So, people's stories to the world. Yep. Sure. And you're also involved with the American Indian tribes. So, is that something that you are involved in? Is that your origin or something you want to do? Okay. So, the question is HeroPress is a form of activism. Am I involved in political activism or any other types of activism? And no, I'm not. Politics bore me two tears. This is my form of activism, I guess. This is what I do. Thank you. Mm-hmm. And it looks like that's it. Thank you.