This past weekend, we attended WordCamp San Francisco, it’s the annual pilgrimage to San Francisco that a lot of WordPressers make, to learn about the state of the press, paradigms in the world of WordPress, and to party. The night before WordCamp, we threw a party with our friends at Range. A notable part of the community showed up, core developers, plugin authors, the press, and even our competitors. It was a great time.
But, something has been bothering me this entire weekend. On Friday, and Saturday, a lot of people saw me talking to my competitors, and approached us saying “I think it’s awesome that you two are talking, and get along”. I’ve run into this sentiment at a lot of WordCamps, so I wanted to address it.
Hoping for the failure of another company is just stupid, and wrong. Jason from WP Engine has a 3 year old, Josh and Sally from Page.ly are brand new parents, if you’re reading this on August 7th 2012, Kai is going to be a father today around 3:30pm.. With any luck, I’ll be a father in the next 24 months.. all of these things are much more important than hosting, and they tie us together as humans.
Since day one, I’ve believed that the success of ZippyKid is not dependent on the failure of WP Engine, Page.ly, WebSynthesis, GoDaddy, Bluehost, or any other hosting company. It’s dependent on our ability to identify what the customer needs, and deliver it to them as easily as possible.
And, the WordPress community. If the community didn’t make such an awesome case for WordPress, there wouldn’t be a need for WordPress specific hosting. This is why we support and attend WordCamps, we want to thank the community for making it possible for people to jump in, not to show how big we are. Obviously, there’s some marketing and growth goals attached to any spend of money, that’s just basic business.
I would say a vast majority of the attendees at WordCamps are freelancers, or business owners that make money from WordPress, and do similar things, if they can get along, share stories and drink, why can’t the hosting companies?
So, next time you see two people from different hosting companies talk to each other, join them for a drink or 14.
[...] ZippyKid / Range party, which was amazing. Big thanks to Vid for helping to arrange than and for facilitating the conversations that he did. Everyone was amazing. I got to meet Matt. That was cool. He was down to earth, and [...]