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.
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.
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.
I received a strange question today. A user was telling me how critical it is that their analytics plugin, Jetpack Stats, works in a specific way with WooCommerce. This got me thinking – wait – why do you need Jetpack Stats? What happens if you ever switch away from WordPress? What if you continue to use WordPress but WordPress.com goes out of business? Am I the only one that worries about these issues?
One of the goals I had when I joined WooThemes nine months ago was to be in the top 10 contributors for WooCommerce. I love contributing to open source projects and I can't think of anything better to work on than our companies flagship product and the most popular e-commerce solution. I'm happy to share that after 268 days I finally made it in the top 10!
A fellow WordPresser sent me an email today asking about WordPress Theme Providers and I thought I'd spend a few more minutes on the response and share it here for everyone.
I’ve got a new project and I’m debating about recommending they purchase a responsive theme, or if I should design one myself. I was trying to remember something you said from past meetings. Did you say avoid ThemeForest? If yes, why?
One of the questions that we get asked in support all the time at WooThemes is “Are credit cards stored in my store?”.
At WooThemes we have 10,000 tickets a month. That's a lot. Like a lot a lot. When you're talking about numbers this big if we can redesign our products to make them more intuitive and reduce our support load by 5% that's 500 tickets a month! That's an entire ninja!
That's why one of the things I want to start looking into is the user experience of all of our products. If we can do less and make our existing products easier to use that will serve us better than adding yet more products that will increase our support load.
One of our products that I think could use work is Table Rate Shipping. It's one of our most configurable and powerful products. The downside of configuration is that it's also complex. It's not one of our top selling products but it is one of the products that needs the most support. Clear candidate for a redesign.
One of the things I enjoy most about vacation is taking some time to read. It's nice to think about new ideas and just let your brain roam free latching on to whatever you want. One of the books I read was REWORK by 37 Signals. They're the guys who run BaseCamp & Highrise CRM. They put out some revolutionary ideas on their blog and one of the founders made a phenomenal TED Talk about time wasted at work.
They talk a lot about bad business practices and how they do everything backwards and how it works out really well for them.