The Kestrel team attended the inaugural WordCamp Canada last month in Ottawa. Canada wasn’t the biggest WordCamp we’ve been to recently, it’s the biggest one we’ve attended as sponsors (so far!)

WordCamps are always a ton of fun, but WordCamp Canada was particularly exciting for me personally, as I’ve never seen all these WordPress people while also being in Canada. It’s a little bit of a worlds-collide situation. (Did you know that Americans don’t know what a butter tart is?)

We had a few goals in sponsoring WordCamp Canada.

Obviously, we want to share who we are and what we’re doing (hey everyone, we’re Kestrel and we build and maintain WooCommerce extensions). That being said, we also wanted to learn from agencies and freelancers – to talk about what they struggle with when building with Woo.

And, for this event in particular, we also wanted to take part in a relatively smaller event to start preparing our team for the flagship WordCamp events. 

Practicing for the bigger WordCamps

As a brand new company, we needed to put together everything it takes to run an event. We didn’t have banners, swag, or anything else. We had to spend a bit of time just to figure out what sponsoring and attending these events means for Kestrel. 

WordCamp Canada may be a national camp, but Canada’s population is both smaller and a lot more spread out than folks in the US or Europe. The organizing team brought out a few hundred people for this event, which is amazing for a first-year.

We saw this relatively smaller event as a great opportunity to put together a booth and try out our various pitches and spiels before investing in a bigger sponsorship at one of the flagship camps, like WCUS or Europe. 

_{(Look, I’m not saying Canada isn’t an important place to put your best foot forward, I’m just saying if you’re going to risk messing something up the first time around, it’s good to do it in a friendly place.)}

A lot of our team have sponsored various WordPress events in the past while part of SkyVerge and Jilt. Personally, I’ve only shown up as a helper, though. This was my first time putting together a booth for an event.

Getting everything together was pretty easy thanks to the clear specifications of the WordCamp Canada organizing team, and it was nice to be able to give it a first-attempt on a relatively affordable event. 

We ordered some banners, designed in a few iterations in Canva by our team of not-quite-designers, and after much discussion around what to hand out at the booth we settled on a few things:

1. Pink bird stickers. They look great on a Macbook. We handed these out at WCEU too, come see us at WCUS if you want one!  
2. And some really nice little pocket notebooks from Scoutbooks, which is a wonderful WooCommerce store for a company out of Portland. (Check them out!) 

We have a few fun ideas we’re working on for future events, too.

Letting people know Kestrel exists

It wasn’t all for practice. We’re a brand new company and we’re still making sure people know we exist. We’ve had a ton of amazing support from various members of the community over the last few months (hey, if you’re reading this at all right now, thanks) but it takes quite a while to build a name for yourself. Even when you’ve done it before! 

We were looking to use this opportunity to speak with community members, freelancers, and agencies.

We love getting feedback from people already using our extensions, but there’s so much to learn about what we’re not currently addressing within our suite of products.

Basically, we wanted to talk with just about anyone who can help us better understand what gaps we can help fill in the WooCommerce ecosystem.

And it worked – we learned a ton to help us better understand how to better serve the Woo community.

If you’re interested in seeing what we’re working on, check out some of our Upcoming Products. We also have a super-secret product launching in the next few weeks, based in part on the feedback we received from attending WordCamp Canada and WCEU!

Seeing people is the best part of WordCamps!

It’s not all about WooCommerce extensions. Sometimes it’s nice just to get together with people who genuinely care about the things you spend all time doing. Ultimately, the real value in these WordCamps is the conversations you get to have with people you know and the people you don’t know yet in the space. 

We are and always have been a fully remote team. We get together a few times a year at most, and WordCamps are looking like a great opportunity for us to do that with our team on a regular basis. Our team attended WCEU and will be attending WCUS next month, too. Going forward, we intend to add a day before or after these events for our team to spend a bit of time together before we get started with the big event.

Shanta, Jamie, Paul, Matt, Kiera, Rick, Gina, Ryan and anyone else who pitched in on setting up the first WordCamp Canada, y’all did a great job.

As a first time sponsor, there were quite a few unknowns along the way and everyone did a great job keeping us updated and in the loop on what was going on. Jamie and Paul even helped roll up the backdrop that is now going to serve as my Zoom background for the next few months (and/or years).

Thanks for helping and thank you for all your hard work putting together such a great event. Let us know when you’re doing the next one 🙂

Anyone who is debating whether the return on investment makes sense for sponsoring a WordCamp should really consider how incredibly valuable it is to talk with all the people who use WordPress and WooCommerce every day.

Even WordCamp Canada, as a relatively small camp, had a surprising number of people who build with WooCommerce every single day. It’s a fairly informal setting where you can get to know the people behind the screens, and where people are primed to talk about the day-to-day of using WordPress and WooCommerce.

Are you attending WCUS in September? Let us know if you want to meet up with a member of the Kestrel team!