I wrote a post in March about preparing for WordCamp Europe in Athens. It was full of practical advice. Plan your trip, learn about the speakers, bring business cards, prepare for the after-party. Useful, but it’s the kind of post you can write before any conference if you’ve been to a few. It told you very little about what mattered when we actually got there.
We took our biggest team to a WordCamp yet. It is expected for me as a CTO and a co-founder to fly out and take parts in these events, but we wanted to expose more of the team to what a large in-person WordCamp is like.
The talks were good as usual. The parties were great. But the best thing was the Emilia Capital meeting. We pitched PersonalizeWP, formerly WP-DXP, to Joost de Valk’s investment fund. I’m not going to write up the meeting itself. What I will say is that the experience of preparing the pitch and then doing it in person at a pitch was one of the best things I’ve done in ages.
And we got a Yes! Which was amazing news and validated our thinking of what we are building. Investors ask different questions to the ones you have running through your head when you’re shipping the next release. They are interested in different things. Some of those questions you’d rather not have to answer. Most of them are fair. We came away with a better understanding about what the product is actually for, who it’s for, and what we’d need to be able to say about it in 12 months that we can’t quite say today. That’s worth the flight on its own.
And the team enjoyed themselves – it was a great bonding experience, so next year we’ll take them again!