The other day someone off handedly called me a WooCommerce evangelist. I was happy being called that, but evangelist is one of those words that's hard to define. What exactly is an evangelist? How are they different from a sales person? Or different from a community manager?
For me it all comes down to intent.
When I first joined WooThemes 10 months ago I had to learn how to work at home. This was a bit of a challenge because I love the work and I often found myself working too much. I was working all day and had a hard time sleeping. I've learned that good work isn't done by working long hours. It's about mentally & physically preparing yourself for work and getting several really productive hours in.
I started going to my favorite coffee shop in the afternoon just to get out of the house in the winter and then a funny thing happened. I started to restrict my work hours. Not only did I determine a start and end time but I also started doing certain types of work in different locations. Without realizing it I started to break my work day into different chunks. I used the different locations as psychological cues to get different types of work done. And with this I've left behind a lot of stress and uninspired / unproductive hours.
One of aspects of the web that I really enjoy are all the meetup groups you can go to. I love the chance to get together with other industry professionals and talk shop. I work on a remote team so I really appreciate every chance to chat with other developers. One of the questions that came up recently in my Appleton WordPress meetup group was on the subject of what computers everyone uses. What I recommend to everyone else is exactly the same thing that I use myself. I use a Macbook Air, 13″, with an external keyboard, external mouse, and a standing desk.
We had our first North American team meetup this year. We decided, as a company, that face to face communication is one of our top priorities and in addition to our yearly WooTrip we want to have at least one smaller get together. Not only did I get to meet new coworkers face to face, but we also got to work together, and attend UserConf, a conference all about customer support.
I'm just getting back from WordCamp Minneapolis where I met great people, talked about business models, ate great food, and had a lot of fun. There was one thing, and actually it was just a single sentence, that really bothered me.
Anything you code we own.
This comment was made by a business owner in reference to his developer writing some personal code at home. Ugh. There's something about this attitude that makes me cringe. The concept of owning everything isn't fair to anyone. It robs the employee of their drive to excel and then that robs the business of a hard working employee. Nobody wins.
A few months ago I wrote a plugin that connects Spee-Dee Delivery, a shipping services for the upper midwest, and WooCommerce. The plugin is going through the audit process right now and should be launched shortly. While the whole process has taken a few months in terms of time writing code the project has only taken ~40 hours. About 20 of which have been doing QA testing to make sure it's as intuitive as possible and doesn't need to be done unless you're planning on selling your plugin.
I've been working with an absolutely stellar team for the past 10 months. One of the best and worst parts about this team is that we're entirely remote. None of us are required to go into an office, work particular hours, or dress in a certain way. The only thing that matters is that we get the job done. While the hours and lifestyle are great the downside of remote working is that you feel so isolated. The closest WooThemes team member is about 400 miles away across 2 states.
ThemeForest has a pretty bad rap in the WordPress world. It's incredibly popular for anyone who doesn't know anything about HTML & CSS because of the cheap prices and huge selection. There is of course a catch – the cheap prices reflect the quality of some of these themes. While the screenshots look nice the code infrastructure that you pay for is very poorly built. If you have any aspirations to use one of these themes in anyway other than the author intended you'll likely run into a whole bunch of issues. I recently modified a ThemeForest theme (which I'm not going to name) for a friend and here are just some of the issues I ran into.
If you have a site that doesn't have WooCommerce installed – how easy would it be to list products? Can you list a bunch of products from another site? Yes you can – and it's actually pretty easy.
I got an interesting email today from someone who wanted to start their own meetup looking for some advice. There's actually a lot of things you have to think about when you're trying to build a community.
There's a million questions that you have to figure out if you really want to build a community. Having helped out at the local Web920, running my own Appleton WordPress, and speaking at a couple meetups in California I have definitely learned a few lessons.