The Beginning of the End, State of the Word and the WooTrainClan

Well, I did this podcast last night on the 7th night of my 8-day adventure. A bit of a recap of all that happened. The train trip ends today, but not the #WooTrainClan. Learn more about what you can expect through the end of this year .

Well everybody, BobWP here. And we are, up on day six, no seven. See, I can’t even count. Seven, so tomorrow, land in Seattle, and in the morning and the, eight day adventures over. So thought what would be nice to do, is there’s kind of three things, but one of them is, a little bit longer. I hope you kind of hang in there with me.

Plan on having Ronald, one of my co-hosts, interview me. We’re going to be doing that between Christmas and New Year’s Eve and I’m going to dive into it a little bit more some of the things I’d done, but I thought it would be, fun to just run you through, what has happened since I left. And it’s, pretty amazing. Some of this stuff was, of course planned. A lot of it was spur the moment, but it’s been an adventure, riding on an Amtrak in a sleeper.

If you’ve ever been in a sleeper, it’s a small room. They say it sleeps two people because it does have a bed up, kind of a bunk, and then a lower one and two seats. But I don’t honestly, understand how two people could live in this small quarters more than maybe 24 hours. Maybe not even that. But anyway, it’s been really interesting and cool. I mean, I’m sitting here, we’re going through Montana right now, just left Havre, Montana. I went out and took a picture of myself, a selfie with an old locomotive there that I’ll put on the artwork for this particular podcast. So you’ll know where we just left. It was, minus one degree, there. So it was nice and brisk, I think there was a heat wave in one of the other cities along the way or little towns, I should call them.

We are all the way up to six, but, and that is fahrenheit. So anyway, so let’s go into this. So what happened, and I’m not going to give you the intro story into how this whole thing, was put together. But so I left Seattle, last Friday that… The of course this is, this Friday so one week ago, I left late afternoon but before I did that, I had a podcast with my friend, Cami MacNamara. She’s a designer in Seattle. I’ve known her for some time and we rented the spot across the street from the train station. WeWork did a podcast and then she saw me off and that was the start of it.

So I traveled the rest of that day, then had a full day the next day. Now the thing about this full day, the next day, and I’ve written about it a little bit, and I think we’ve… If you’ve listened to some of the podcasts, but it was really, really bizarre, is that I was walking along. I was wearing my Woo shirt and somebody said, “Oh, Woo!” in fact, there were several people on the train that liked it, but they were just woo! The… Some of the wait staff of, in the dining room, they really liked it. She would go every time she… I’d go ahead and she’d go, woo! woo! woo!

She thought it was a cool shirt for that reason. Not really knowing what it really was, but anyway, so I was walking by and somebody said, “Oh, woo!” And then they said, “WooCommerce, cool. I’m part of the WordPress community. That’s really cool.” And she probably expected somebody to just kind of look at her and say, “Oh yeah my brother-in-law gave it to me from a conference or something.” But I kind of paused and looked at her and she looked at me and she said, “What’s your name?”

I said, “Bob Dunn.” And she got looked. I said, “BobWP.” And sure enough, this is somebody I’ve known online for several years, which was really weird because she was, in the same actual car, not just on the same train, but in the same car. Which led to, I believe we had a breakfast and a lunch together, we did a podcast together. And that was a blast. The next day, right before we were heading to Chicago, picked up Mike Demo from Codeable and that was pre-planned, we’d planned it, but it was going to be really fun. He was going to get on in St. Paul and then ride about, eight hours to Chicago with me. And we were going to do a podcast and just catch up on things we hadn’t talked for a long time. Like a lot of us haven’t talked for a long time in real life.

It was a wonderful time. And what we had planned on doing is then, Codeable had… We’d set up a dinner in Chicago with a few WordPress peeps and you can go in and see everybody that attended that. And we were a bit stressed and because we were two hours late, so dinner was real quick. It wasn’t quite as casual and relaxing as we’d hoped. And I got there, we had to move the reservation up. We got there just shortly thereafter. Mike was running through the train station, catching a taxi to at least meet people there. While Susan, the person I met, she decided to come to the dinner. We followed along in another taxi and so you can… Of course, you’ll probably, you heard that story or read about it in another one. So we had a great dinner and by, I think what we got there like 7:30 and I believe it was 8:30 or I got there at seven, 8:30 head back to the train.

So I got on the train, and then headed to New York City. And that was rather uneventful. I mean, I had some pretty good time, it was, I mean, it was a train ride and everything went fine. We were on time and everything. I did some work, I did some social, wrote some posts got some, of the podcasts produced and put out and arrived in New York City. Now there was going to be a dinner, at the hotel with several people that had put together one and we kind of, somebody reserved this hotel and then several of us follow suit. So there was, I don’t know how many actually stayed there, but there was quite a few of us. Well, I didn’t think I was going to make it for the dinner and lo and behold, dinner started at seven o’clock and I got there right on the dot.

And so I was able to squeeze in there and have a great time just catching up. And I did mention this and I might dive into it a little bit more, when I talked to Ronald, depending on the direction he must go. But I remember are being so hurried and get off the train, get in the cab or maybe his Uber. I can’t even remember which one at that point and get there, saw them all sitting in there. Its like, wow. So I went ahead and checked in. Didn’t even do anything else in my room, booked out of there, went out to the dinner and sat down. And there was a surreal moment of actually looking around seeing all these faces I know. It was almost like you wanted to poke at people. Are you real? Because for a lot of us over two years and so that was the first initial, reaction I had, I just had to kind of sit there and look around.

Then it was like, whoa, okay just, was like, we all seen each other, two months ago. So had the dinner, the next day was the day of the State of the Word. And that morning I spent some time, of course, what was interesting is, we all seem to gather at this restaurant, there’s a restaurant, hooked onto the hotel and we just all kind of gravitate, a couple people might grab a table, then a few more would come in a few more. And I think a few of us might have had breakfast that morning. Then I did some, I did I think three podcast in the hotel room and I had to actually ask the hotel if they could bring a couple of chairs up, because I thought it’d be really weird for us all to be sitting on the bed, doing a podcast.

And so we did, we favored nice enough to get a couple of chairs, bring them up. And I did three podcasts and you can go back through the archives and see, I call them the Pre-State of the Word where, it was just fun conversation. And also a little bit of what, each of them, their expectations of State of the Word. Then the afternoon I don’t know we just did some things that afternoon. I think maybe we did one of the podcasts, Dave was kind of a blur, seemed like there was plenty to do. That day we, I went in, I took somebody to lunch and I saw a couple of other people down there. I thought, well, this is an opportunity to have Do the Woo lunch. So ended up about 10 of us in there. And that was really fun to be able to treat everybody. Again, great lunch.

Then we did some more stuff in the afternoon. Then we all headed over to the State of the Word. And State of the Word, I’m going to kind of leave that I’m hoping Ronald maybe will listen to this podcast. We’re going to leave that up for his podcast when he talks to me, because there’s some things that I took away from State of the Word that maybe other people didn’t well… I shouldn’t say that because somebody did, take away something I really thought about a lot and you could always say, hey, what was the thing that, most excited about, State of the Word, but there was other emotions and perceptions and everything else going through me. I mean I loved Matt Mullenweg, State of the Word. It was very cool, but there was a lot more to it than that.

So I’m going to save that and let Ronald talk to me about that more in the podcast coming up in a couple of weeks or so. So State of the Word, then the next day was, oh, it was kind of a mellow day. People were starting to shift out and leave. Different people might be staying and I had arranged another lunch, another Do the Woo lunch, but a smaller group of people. And I think originally we had five or six and it was at a little Italian restaurant, which was convenient, conveniently located right next door. So did some stuff that morning. I had some more podcasts to do. I think I did two podcasts. I planned on doing three, one of them didn’t work out. And by the time lunch rolled around, a couple of people couldn’t make it. And then we picked up one person, that was going to be heading to the airport just enough time for her to actually join us for lunch.

I think it was really a nice little Italian. It was probably one of those special, I call it. And even though it was a Do the Woo lunch, it was a special lunch because it was small intimate crowd, group of us. It was Bud Krause from Joy of WordPress, Toper and Cate from HeroPress and Robbie Adair from OSTraining and myself. And we had wonderful Italian food with a bottle of champagne. And I think one of us even broke down and had dessert, and some of us had cappuccinos, but it was perfect. And that was, okay, it was time to say goodbye to New York. Bud and I kind of hung out and walked around and visited a bit and I went to a typical New York City tourist shop, one of those little open ones along there, because I wanted to buy a couple of things for Judy and yeah, so that was it.

And Bud went with me to the train station, thinking with the intentions of… He actually thought of getting on the train for about an hour. Us doing a podcast and he turn around and come back because he lives in New York City. Well that kind of went awry. He got a coach seat and he was coming, get aboard with me and it seemed like it was going to be a pain and all these things. And Bud was very disappointed. I was disappointed we’ll have to do a podcast soon online, but it was great scene Bud. And I was kind of we were both disappointed in that. So, I left early that or actually late afternoon. And that was, what was that? Oh, I can’t even remember a couple of days ago I guess, it’s all starting to blur.

Went to Chicago, again just doing stuff on the train, doing work and in Chicago which was, actually yesterday. I had to think about that. I had a layover, just like I did for that dinner, but this time, it was on time. So I had a few more hours. And so what I did is, I co-host, which you’ve heard Zach Stepek on our podcast, was in Chicago. He lives a little ways out of Chicago, but he was in there overnight. He had taken his son to a concert for his birthday. So it was an opportunity for me to go and just, have a cup of coffee and sit and chat with Zach, for, I don’t know, we did 45 minutes an hour and I got to meet his son. It was just, again, a little surreal like get off the train, go and see one of my co-host, hang a bit, have some conversation.

And then I went to the mall, to go Christmas shopping for Judy, because that was something I had promised myself and kind of promised her too. But I hadn’t had the chance to do all the Christmas shopping. So I went to a bowl there that was a little interesting. It was high end bowl, which I don’t normally go to, but it was fun spending money there of course and then I turned around, got back on the train and that was yesterday and today is today. So been traveling across Montana. This is how it worked when I was coming over, this pretty much this entire day. Montana is one long field and one long fence, it seems like, except for where the little towns pop up. So it’s interesting state, but it’s been pretty. It’s been cold as I told you, I think it was minus one out there. The last one, I think it warmed up to six degrees as I mentioned.

But anyway, so that’s it. And so tomorrow, is the end of it and I don’t expect anything very dramatic or anything happening. I’ll, I think I’ve met quite a few people on this car and none of them are my WordPress friends, so that isn’t going to happen again, which was very rare indeed. But yeah, that’s it. So I just wanted to give you that whole whirlwind thing. Of course there was, so much in between all that, so many conversations, it was so cool to see people and of course I would love to have, had this been a big US WordCamp, go to State the Word. I might have done it a little differently. Will I do a train again? I think it’s going to be awhile.

Next time I’ll definitely be going, hopefully be going to San Diego WordCamp in the fall of next year. If all things go well with the way the world is and looking forward to that. Two more things I want to cover before I go, and please bear with me and hang in there because I really want to tell you to have you hear these two things. So I’m going to kind of carry this Post-State of the Word. Like I said, through the end of the month, I’m not going to… I don’t plan on doing a lot of work. I’m going to try to take some kind of break, it’s the holidays.

But as I said, Ronald will be interviewing me and I might do a couple little posts. There may be something else. I’ll be putting some more content up there and I’ll be collecting all the photos and everything and create, kind of filling out that landing page I have on my site for this eight day event, adventure, whatever you want to call it. And so, check out that, I’ll continue, when I’m sharing stuff about this, I’ll continue using the hashtag on Twitter, WooTrainClan and that’s been a favorite among a lot of people. It’s been a fun one. I’m glad somebody thought of it because everybody’s really enjoyed it.

So you can do that. And of course go to dothewoo.io and you’ll find the SOTW landing page there. Now my last thing I want to do, and please hang in there and listen, because this is really important. I know, you may say, okay, he’s going to thank the sponsors, but you really got to understand that these sponsors, these four sponsors stepped up, big time.

This was not a small resourced event. This was, there was a lot of resources I had to, money wise to get in place, to actually do all the things I wanted to do. And I had just about a week to get four sponsors. And this is not the best time of the year to get sponsors. I’m telling you, December, they pretty much have their money spent. So I was incredibly, incredibly lucky to get four sponsors.

And they’ve made this memorable adventure for me that I’ll never forget and I’m hoping some other people won’t forget either because it was, it was very different and it was very unique. So let me talk about my four sponsors and please, keep them in mind for what services they offer.

If you need to refer somebody to what they offer, there are four fantastic companies in the WordPress base. First of all, Mindsize. Mindsize is kind of known for their agency work, their high end, large scale Woo shops. And they’ve been doing this a long time and I know them personally and they know their stuff and it’s takes somebody special, to build these kind of high volume, high scale, or even if you’re scaling up, type of sites, but they have a new maintenance website, maintenance and support plan, and you really need to check them out because they’re broken up in a few different ways here. I’ve got the computer open, I’m cheating, but I just wanted to talk about it a little bit. So they have the WooCommerce, of course they’ll do WordPress too and they do Shopify. Yes, they do.

I mean, that’s only fair, but they have a basic, a professional, a premium and an enterprise maintenance. And I think this is ideal for those of you, that build sites and you just, you don’t have the resources or maybe your company just don’t want to get into the maintenance part of it. Maybe you do a little bit afterwards, but for long term, you’re into, building the sites and getting the best thing out to them. And once you build those sites, of course, you want, to hand them over to somebody you could trust that could actually, help those people maintain their sites. And some of that maintenance is as they scale and they grow. So, do check out mindsize.com because they have some really, really cool maintenance plans. And like I said, they know WooCommerce inside and out. If you’ve been on WooCommerce Slack. You know that the owner Patrick said there all the time answering questions, he knows his stuff.

The other sponsor is, GoDaddy Pro and it’s their Hub. Now this isn’t, I’m not talking about hosting GoDaddy, I’m talking about their Hub. And again, for those of you that have a lot of clients. It’s one of those kind of things that lets you take care of all your clients in one nice tidy little spot. So you’re not having to spend a lot of time, maintenance and security and all that stuff, going around all your different clients and trying to organize things and creating spreadsheets and all that stuff, you don’t want to do.

You go to one dashboard, you sign in, then everything’s there, the client projects, the products that they are selling, everything that you can keep on top of to… If you do, maintenance or if you’re just, you have a several sites that you’re doing maybe you don’t need somebody else to do maintenance, but you’d rather do something like this or you’ve built this in, this is another option.

And they have a prioritized support and it’s just, even in, they have a forum, that’s through the GoDaddy Pro Hub, which is other developers and designers. So you can get a lot of information and learn a lot from the community itself. So go to godaddypro.com and you’ll find the Hub there. I think I have a link and I was given a short link for that and I’m embarrassed to say, I’ve forgotten it because it happens sometime in the middle of being in New York City. But I know that you can go to dothewoo.io/hub and it’ll send you there as well. So check them out.

Now, hang in there, two more. I’ve got two more here that I want to tell you about. Post Status, Post Status, I don’t know if, how many of you belong to Post Status, but if you are a WooCommerce, a business that builds WooCommerce sites or products, or you are simply, maybe you don’t do WooCommerce. Maybe this whole State of the Word series has not been focused on WooCommerce maybe it’s WordPress.

Post Status is the place for WordPress businesses. And they’ve been around for several years. They’re the place to know, what is going on in the space. So if you’re, you’ve been doing stuff for a while and you still feel like you’re unconnected and you just need to kind of get fingers around and meet more people and wrap your brain around, what’s happening, or if you’re new to this space and you’re thinking, how in the world do I get kind of find my way through these, the navigating, the WordPress community.

That’s what they’re there for. And we’re a network partner there. And that simply means that we, change… Exchange content, help each other. I’m kind of the WooCommerce side of things. And they just offer a lot of stuff. They offer guidance. They’ll help you think through, strategically and how to focus your efforts, growing your business. And this can be done working with people, Post Status, or this can be done on their slack channel. Same with the connections, you’ll meet a lot of people in their slack channel. A lot of people help each other and sometimes they just have fun discussing things. So it’s not always has to be hardcore business. They’ll support you as a business member. They’ll, give you access to special events that they’ll be having.

Yeah. Primarily its giving you, the resources and the help for you to grow your business. And this is huge and you want, to be able to have someone that knows what’s going on in this base, and some additional perks I know that they have, are, you get annual membership, unlimited job postings, and they’re really good. They’ve had real success with companies that post jobs there. So this is a great place, because it’s hard to find a good place to do that. There’s offers from other partners, business profile, you have your own business profile. They’re going to have referrals, for you can be that’s going to be coming down the road. They’ll be matching you with partners and clients and customers. So there’s a whole bunch of stuff there and you’re almost, how can I word this nicely?

Let me just say, if you’re a WordPress, press business, you need to be involved, with Post Status. It’s going to, pay off big time. So check out poststatus.com. And lastly, we do have one final, host and that is Cloudways. So if you are looking for WooCommerce hosting for your clients, there’s a lot of hosts out there and they all have their strengths and you got to look at Cloudways and see there’s going to be some, clients that fit that perfectly. And a couple things they’re really strong on with their hosting for WooCommerce is security and scalability. And if you’ve done anything with WooCommerce, you know, that, that is two of the biggest issues, and scalability nobody knows when scalability’s going to happen.

Sometimes it happens, unplanned even, and you need to be ready for it. And that’s where your hosts, has your, has you covered. Or has your clients covered I should say, so do check them out because they do, they have a great platform. They have a great stack of tools and software, that will help you team collaboration. So you can actually, your team can work together within the hosting platform. And they have some plans, they have a variety of plans depending on, where your customer is at with their Woo store, as far as size and the, and exactly what they need.

They have a starter bundle. If you know somebody, sometimes maybe talking to somebody and they’re just not the right fit or maybe they had somebody do a sign and they’re asking you, I just need something to start my WooCommerce hosting to have that as well. So do check out Cloudways for WooCommerce hosting. If your clients are looking for something or perhaps you may even be looking for a new host, especially if you sell products, maybe sell some WooCommerce plugins or something like that and you need some solid hostings.

So do check out Cloudways and please keep those four in mind. Because like I said, they’re awesome companies they’ve been supportive of the Do the Woo community, which is huge. And I, treasure every one of the relationships I have with all of them.

So that’s it. Yep. This is, this is the final one on the train. I don’t know if and when you’ll ever hear Bob on a train podcasting again, I mean, I don’t, like I said it’s not going to be any time in the near future. And maybe if I hit my head and I forget that I did this, maybe I’ll do it again. No, I’m just kidding. It wasn’t bad. It was just it’s a very different way of doing this.

And like I said, one of the cool things about it is, as I was talking to you, I’m going through Montana, looking out at fences and fields. Like I told you and farms and people that live out there. And I can only think these little houses way out here do any of them use WordPress? Do any of them host on Cloudways? Have any of them have Mindsize, do maintenance for them? Do any of them belong Post Status I wonder, or maybe they have a few sites of other farms that they do and they have it on GoDaddy Hub. I don’t know. Probably not. Maybe. I don’t know. You never know. I never knew that I’d run into another WordPress here on the train, so hey, never say never. Well, that’s it, like I said, a bit more content coming up, so keep your eyes open, because I’m hoping to get some more reflection from the State of the Word that I’ll be sharing with you.

It’s always interesting to hear what people say and I’m also going to be putting together, on that page resource of some of the other post said, others have written about State of the Word, because there’s already some good stuff out there. Post Status had a short interview with Matt afterwards, Michelle Frechette, did that and talked a little bit about acquisitions in the space. So I think it’s… Yeah, I’m going to have a lot of stuff there.

Because lot of the stuff that happens at State of Word and a lot of things that people talk about, do transpire and take place over the next year. And sometimes it’s good to reflect on that. So I really enjoy doing this. It’s been a community, event adventure that I never thought I would have experienced. And partly for, because of you, as listeners that constantly, give me hope and support that I’m helping you Do the Woo.

So when I land, I don’t know if you actually land on a train, but I’m going to say that you’ll be hearing me from me again. And we have a lot of stuff kicking off in January with Do the Woo podcast. So it’s not stopping, it’s just going stronger. And this is just one of the things that we do when we Do the Woo. So as my good friend, Jeff Chandler says Woo, choo choo. He does it a lot better though, till the next time.