Building extensions for fun and profit, at WCUS 2024

Kestrel was founded in March 2024 — so we’re still a very new team! Despite being founded this year, our team is made up of WooCommerce veterans¹, so one of the major things we were excited to do was get back together in real life at a WordCamp.

We were able to gather our team at WCEU, and sponsor the first WordCamp Canada. But, a lot of folks we’ve worked with in the past only planned to attend WordCamp US [WCUS]. Despite being a new company, we decided we’d both attend and sponsor WCUS. We could raise awareness of Kestrel, and attending let us share more about the new WooCommerce extensions we’re building!

There was a lot that happened at WCUS this year. In this post, we want to focus on the positive connections we made with the Woo community, and what we learned as attendees and sponsors.

Sponsoring WCUS 2024

First up, this was our second time sponsoring a WordCamp! So, we were keen to put previous learnings into practice.

Our author sponsorship gave us a small booth, which was primarily manned by Fulvio and Tabitha. With a small space, the ability to give away swag is limited, so we brought notebooks (small items!). We also tried something new: teaching visitors how to use origami to fold our logo.

Some folks enjoyed the origami or took it home to do with their kids! However, we found this wasn’t a great option for a small booth. We had nice conversations with folks who wanted to fold the logo with us, but this activity would have been better in a large booth (where we could have had a table with stools). Origami is a great conversation starter, but wasn’t a great fit for our small space.

We also found the lack of booth customization made it hard for folks to see what Kestrel does. Swag that clearly showed we work with WooCommerce would have helped. (We also would love to see WCUS let sponsors customize the front panel of the booth to solve this problem!)

Attending the conference and meetups

Outside of our sponsorship, we also wanted to bring folks together who work on WooCommerce. We decided to co-host a small event with our friends at Metorik to bring together folks who build Woo plugins or websites. Since we decided to do this a bit late, we had limited space, but it was still wonderful to have conversations with Woo builders and product companies we’ve never met, or haven’t caught up with in a while.

After we decided to host our event, the Woo team did announce a community event, which we also attended.

We enjoyed meeting even more folks working with WooCommerce, and loved the added bonus of touring a submarine at their venue. They gave out Voodoo donuts as a party favor, which we were so good we neglected to snap a photo. 😆

And of course, we saved time to have a few meals together for team bonding. Kestrel is fully remote, so we don’t have a central office for the team. While meeting up with folks who work with WooCommerce was our primary goal, we also wanted to do some team bonding.

Our takeaways

So what are the takeaways for future conferences? Our goals were …

• First: we’ve always looked at WordCamp sponsorship as a way to support the community and event (which helps drive innovation and adoption in WordPress).
• Second, raise awareness of our new brand.
• Third, meet other builders and users in the Woo space.

So how did we do against those goals?

• While we’re proud of supporting WordCamps, we may do a micro sponsorship in the future for big camps — and instead focus on presence at small camps where booths can clearly attract users and agencies in our space. (Not to mention, meet more folks close to our homes!)
• For future events, we’ll try to get more information on booth and sponsor hall layout before deciding on swag. While we thought origami would be space-efficient and help us have conversations with visitors, it was impractical for our booth setup.
• We’ll also focus more on making sure swag can do “advertising” for what we do — we banked on using a banner to do this, which wasn’t possible at this event.
• Hosting a small meetup is worth considering again for future events. We had great conversations with the type of folks we hoped to meet. (And it’s just also fun and relaxing.)

To those of you we met up with: let’s do it again soon! We’d love to work more closely with you. And finally, a special thank you to Justin Sainton (sponsors lead) and the other organizers we worked with or met who made the event possible — their jobs are hard, unpaid, and so no need for them to be thankless, too. ♥️

1. The title of our post is even an homage to our first Woo event! Max, Justin, and Brent Shepherd (Prospress) gave a similarly titled talk at the very first WooConf. ↩︎