How to Run a Good WordPress Meetup with Liam Dempsey

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Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks “How did you build that?” Today, I’ll be asking a slightly different question to my guest and good friend, Liam Dempsey. Liam, how are you doing today?

Liam Dempsey: Joe, I’m absolutely [Inaudible] to be here. Thank you for asking. Thanks for having me on.

Joe Casabona: Awesome. Right, thanks for being here. I’m asking Liam today, not how did you build it, but how did you do that? Because we’re going to be talking about building a good community and WordPress and Liam once runs a very popular WordPress meetup called the Philly ‘Burbs Meetup herein, can we say Southeastern Pennsylvania? Can we say that?

Liam Dempsey: Yeah. We say suburban Philly.

Joe Casabona: All right. Cool. Very cool. My first go at living in Pennsylvania was Northeastern, Pennsylvania, and Scranton. So I don’t know where that ends in, like the rest of the state begins. So cool. Well, in suburban Philly, does that make you a job? Is that like a derogatory term? Do you know that term?

Liam Dempsey: I’m not even familiar with that term, so I’m not taking it as derogatory?

Joe Casabona: All right. So that was a term that I learned when I was at the University of Scranton and people would say I’m just outside Philly. So they’d be called jobs.

Liam Dempsey: Ahhh, okay! okay!

Joe Casabona: Yeah. Well, that’s good that it’s not derogatory, you know, I don’t want to…

Liam Dempsey: For me, but I’m not from around Philly so some of my neighbors who are might take offense to it. But it’s all right with me for now until I Google that term after this conversation.

Joe Casabona: Sounds good. Then we’ll have to, I’ll have to bleep it in a post or something like that.

Liam Dempsey: If it is offensive. Yeah, we should do that.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. Awesome. So, okay, great. So Liam, aside from organizing this meetup, you’re also one of the organizers of WordCamp US, which at the time of this recording is coming up. So you have quite a bit of experience in kind of events planning and stuff like that. But, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and the meetup and how you came up with the idea for doing the meetup?

Liam Dempsey: Yeah, absolutely. So I came to Philly in 2009 and went to, I think my first WordCamp was WordCamp Philly, 2010. And I’d never been to any meetup or anything WordPress-related. When I was living in Oxford, I went to a few instances of the Oxford Geek nights, which was a fantastic multi-technology meetup gathering in Jericho of Oxford.

But so 2010 was my first experience with the WordPress community. And I had that classic, “I don’t want to go.” It was Saturday morning and I was standing next to my car and I’m like, it’s only 25 bucks. I can just let it go. I don’t want to go. But I got in the car and I went, you know, the conversation, we all have to ourselves. And once I was in the car, I was excited and I got down. I parked for free on the street. It was great. And I had a fantastic time and I was just absolutely blown away by the welcoming nature of the WordPress community. There wasn’t the tech ego. There was very much the “Hi! My name is…Welcome! Nice to meet you” kind of thing that we knew.

And I now regularly experience WordCamps that were very new to me, and it really blew my mind. So I was excited that I went. And I then started to go to the Philadelphia WordPress meetup that Brad Williams and Doug Stewart, and I think ‘Gusto’ were running. Now, Alex Block is involved with that now. But at the time, it was just the three guys and I was going into that. I live far enough out of Philly, it’s about an hour, hour and 10 down to the meetup, depending on traffic. And so I was looking at the meetup page and saying, ”I kind of know that topic. I don’t really want to go in and it’s not worth it.” And as you and I know Joe, the topics of the meetup are important, but it’s really not the most valuable aspect of a meetup. And I found myself after the second and the third meetup where I was having that conversation with myself. I thought, “You know what? I wonder if I could just start a WordPress meetup out in the Burbs.” And I was still really new to Philly. I worked from my home just like a lot of us do, work for myself. So I didn’t have an end to the local community. I’m not from around Philly, as I said.

So eventually I worked up the courage to ask Brad and Doug about it after we meetup at kinda one of those “Hey, so I’m kind of, I was, you know, thinking maybe…” and Doug’s answer was so wonderful and so reflective of the WordPress community. He just looks at me with that bright smile that he has and says, “You know, I think you should totally go for it because you know, the worst that’s going to happen is, is you’re going to choose one of your favorite bars, you’re going to sit down order one of your favorite burgers at that favorite bar, and no one’s going to show up. And you’re going to have your favorite beer with your favorite burger at your favorite bar. And if it works, Great! And if it doesn’t, well, you’ve had a nice night out.” So it was the welcome that I needed. And so the next step was really to find a colleague of mine, Corin who is a copywriter and marketing consultant. And I said, “Hey, can we get together and talk about starting a meetup?” And so we did. And in May of 2012, we started it.

Joe Casabona: That’s awesome. And that’s like that whole story. I mean, I’m from this area, I really, you know, came into the WordPress community while in Pennsylvania. So, you know, I resonate more with that community than any other community. And that’s just, I mean, Doug’s great, you know, they’re all great guys, everybody you mentioned but that’s a great point. You know you pick a bar and the worst comes to worst, you have a beer. You know, and that’s really what it is. That’s fantastic. So you got a co-organizer, is that right?

Liam Dempsey: I did. I did. I am, funnily enough, no parts event planner or at least I wasn’t at the time. You know what I would think about events, I would think about fundraisers or weddings or that kind of formal affair. And I don’t care what color the napkins are. I don’t care what the table settings look like. I want the food to be good. I want there enough to be enough of it, but I want it presented nicely, but I can’t sweat the details. So Corin, a copywriter, and a marketing consultant. And as such, she cares about details. I don’t know if she cares about napkin colors, but it seemed a good idea to have another set of eyes, a smarter brain, and somebody who can communicate efficiently on the initial team to start it at ups.

So We started with that. And we registered on meetup.com, and we just started tweeting about it. And really wanted to make that first meetup just be, what does everybody want? I had done enough casual research online and reading to know that for a meetup to be successful. It can’t be about the organizer. The organizer is the facilitator, the chief servant if you will. But it’s not about the organizers.

And so by as quickly as possible, that first meeting, turning the meetup over to the members themselves and letting them have control seemed to be a really strong way to start.

Joe Casabona: That’s such a great point, right? Because you know, you don’t want to go into planning a meetup with the wrong mindset of, well, I’m going to use them, I’m going to have a captive audience to promote myself, right? That’s the meetups are going to fail fast. And that’s really not what it’s about. It’s about the community. So having the first one to be a, what do you guys want this to be is, is awesome because you’re essentially getting other WordPress people who live locally in the room, and networking, right. So you said that you did a bit of research on that. Did you, and then that you talked to Doug, right? Did you talk to…this was May of 2012, right? So there were a few meetups going on at the time, right? Did you reach out to other regional areas? Or did you…

Liam Dempsey: Embarrassingly, no. I talked to Doug. I talked to Brad. talked a lot with Corin. I’ve been to some other marketing meetups and I had gone to one network and to learn, but also to really pay attention to what I felt worked at their meetups, which would encourage people to engage. What I saw as potential challenges and kind of took that approach to research. So I didn’t actually talk to any other meetup organizers. I certainly would have listened to them and read blog posts about that.

Some of the things I wanted to definitely make sure our meetup avoided was becoming an online training or a regular training meetup. People are expected to learn, but I didn’t want it to be, “Hey, show up. And Liam, or Liam and friends or Liam and Corin and colleagues will teach you.” It’s a, we come together to share knowledge. So I might teach one month, Corin might teach one month, but somebody in the audience is going to teach the third month and somebody else is going to teach the fourth month. So really making sure that the group saw it as an Inward investment of everybody and not, this is a price place for free training.

Joe Casabona: Nice. That’s awesome. And I mean, it makes sense too, causes right, you know, talk to somebody in the Midwest and or just is not your area. And what they do might not work for your community, right? Every community is different and you have to kind of work with the people that you are bringing together.

Liam Dempsey: Right? Exactly. Exactly.

Joe Casabona: Awesome. So how do you do it? Why don’t you, so why don’t we do this? Why don’t you take us through your typical planning a meetup, right? Choosing the location, finding speakers, and choosing the topics. And then we can talk more generally about how you built up the community that you have now?

Liam Dempsey: Yeah, absolutely. So some of the lessons that I have observed in my very informal research was that there needed to be enough space for the meetup to grow. I didn’t have to have room for 50, but if we were going to start with eight or 10 is kind of conservative number for the beginning. And we were going to hopefully grow to 20 or 25, we needed to have rooms that we didn’t have to find a new space right away. And that was one, not only to reduce the administrative overhead of having to find a space but also just so that people could come to learn where the meetup is. That consistency of we meet here, we meet there, we meet here, we meet there rather than keep having to hop around.

But within that, we also were aware of Corin and I was aware that we didn’t have a concentration of people in any one area. The suburbs aren’t as densely populated as Philly. And there was a wider professional community. So we didn’t think we would have enough developers and designers in one little town if you will. So we deliberately chose four different locations around what are really the Western suburbs of Philly to enable us to reach as wide audience as possible.

And when we were looking at stops, we wanted clearly if we’re in the suburbs, we need reasonably free or available parking. We needed space. We needed to have some kind of food, some kind of drink. So it couldn’t be at a library. We didn’t want to get into having to cater it or get food in advance. We wanted whatever facility we were gonna meet up on a given night, we wanted them to be able to take care of all the food and drink directly with the meetup people. Again, reducing our own administrative overhead of trying to pay for things in advance and then hope to meet ups pays us back or that kind of thing.

Joe Casabona: Right. And I mean, that makes sense, right? Because the more work it is for you, you know, one month when you get busy and my fault of the wayside, but kind of making everything on audit, putting everything on autopilot makes it more consistent meetup.

Liam Dempsey: Yeah. And the other side of it is that it enables people to engage more meaningfully. So they’re asked to carry some of the load and no part of the load is overburdening in any one given. Part of it, but by everybody carrying a little bit and enables the group to go forward a lot, rather than one person carrying it for four months and saying, “You know what, this is too much. I want out.” Or, “Do it for a year. This is too much. I want out.”

Joe Casabona: Nice. So, that was choosing a location. Sorry. I just totally interrupted.

Liam Dempsey: Well, no, I was going to move on to the next point. So you’re doing it. Go ahead.

Joe Casabona: Cool. Awesome. Yeah. So that was choosing a location. What about finding speakers and topics?

Liam Dempsey: Well, fortunately, even by 2010, 2012, and 2012 when we started WordPress was a big enough entity in the tech scene that it wasn’t that hard to reach out to some people for those early talks. Our first talk was with a local developer assistant admin guy. The dev-ops guy made me, these days called Dave Konopka and Dave came out and did a fantastic talk for us. And he does a great job at explaining very technical things in non-technical ways. So we’d have a real mix of people in our audience of different professions.

And then I know I leaned on Doug and Brad to come out a couple of times and truth be told, I did a few presentations at first-year myself, filling in the gaps. But what I found very early on is that if you ask, “Hey, would you like to talk and just put it up to the committee?” Almost no one will say yes. But if you say, “Hey, Joe, will you give a talk in September? Or, “Hey Mary, would you talk next month? Or “Sue, can you give a talk about this specific topic at a time that works for you?” People will say Yes.

Joe Casabona: Gotcha. It’s like that old adage about if a group of people sees somebody getting robbed, nobody’s going to do anything because they assume somebody else will, right?

Liam Dempsey: Yeah. Yeah. And I don’t know if I can, I don’t know if I’m ready particularly in our group where we really encourage our members to give their first talk. I mean, the WordPress community is so gentle and so welcoming that if you’re going to massively screw up on your first talk, what better way than do five minutes at a neuro local meetup, where everybody’s going to say “Great talk. That was nice. Thanks for doing that.”

So that really enables me to say, “Hey Joe, you’ve come to a few meetups now. I know that you do this for a living. Could you talk a little bit about this plugin? Cause you’ve mentioned it three or four times. Could you do a five-minute talk on that?” And people, they like that they’ll say yes. It’s a very specific task. It’s a very specific ask. And it enables them to dip their toe in it and feel like they’re giving back without having to prepare a full-on talk.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. And like a five-minute talk I mean, if you’ve taken a public speaking class in college, you’ll know that five minutes is not, you’ll have a hard time whittling it down to five minutes, more than getting five minutes of content.

Liam Dempsey: Yeah, that was another thing that I learned going back to those Oxford gate nights. They had these little speed talks and it was five, 10 minutes. And they had some that were five and some that were 10. And I remember it, those, after keep nights, just the end of the night, having five or 10 of these talks. Sometimes I had no idea what they were talking about. But I can scribble something down and Google it the next day and it just sounded cool. And that was kind of the idea for our meetup is if we do two really short talks, you know, you could be a copywriter that knows nothing about WordPress, but you know, this plugin, he knows how to install it and why you use it. Boom! There’s your five minutes. Great!

So those two short talks is proven really valuable to our group. One in covering a lot of the topics, but enabling people to get started on speaking if they want.

Awesome. And you mentioned that your community is, well, the community, right? I’ll be, I’m like an hour away from there, now I’ll be living in Westchester, you know, this time next year.

Liam Dempsey: Looking forward to that. I’ll schedule you and [Crosstalk 17:47.91]

Joe Casabona: Perfect. That sounds great. I’m actually, I’m really looking forward to that. You know, I love Bethlehem, but I’m kind of in-between places where I know a lot of people. So not that I don’t, you know, I go to the meetup here in the Lehigh Valley and that’s a great one. But, I know I have all, you know, family and friends living in Westchester, just back, you know, back-talking that. And in case anybody from Lehigh Valley listens to this, I love you guys.

But you have, you have a very diverse group of people. So do you, I guess the question I’m kind of leading towards is when you choose topics. Is it, can you kind of assume, or like this is the group of people or that are going to come? Or do you try to cater kind of to everybody in the same night?

Liam Dempsey: So the answer is a little bit of everything and that’s the nature of a volunteer-driven meetup.

Historically, it had always just been, I would try to catch as much as I could. So I would see people or invite them so that we would have a speaker. “Joe, can you come and talk in September kind of thing?” What should I talk about? Well, you’ve written your book of web images and you’ve blogged about this and you talk about this and you’ve got teaching, maybe something in those sorts of lines. But every once in a while, we’ll have kind of a groundswell of interest around a particular topic.

So in the autumn of last year, we did one entire meetup on the Genesis Framework. So we had a couple of five-minute talks about it and then sell for a fellow, did a 20 to 25 minute, half hour talk on the Genesis Framework. And that was really,. really valuable. And a lot of people have now in the meetup latched onto the Genesis Framework as their primary tool.

And so when we have that mix and match, that’s what we try to go with over the summer, we started a Github account for the meetup where we use the issue tracker for people to post five-minute and main presentation ideas. And the rest of us can comment on or upvote on that. And then that enables me to: One, know what people are interested in and then two, have a list. So if we have somebody, a potential speaker who really does have a wide range of skills and interests and experience, we can direct them to those issue trackers and say, “Is there anything there that would be of value or that you would feel comfortable talking about?”

So it’s enabling the group to document in a way that doesn’t get lost in my email inbox about what they want to hear about. And then also for potential speakers to feel like they’re going to present on something that really is of interest to the group.

Joe Casabona: Nice. And, I guess the last part of this multi-pronged, how do you do it question? Before we move on to the other ones is, how do you get people to come?

Liam Dempsey: So that’s a quick question with a lot of answers. And I’m going to kind of share back with you in the way that I’ve jotted them here and in the way that they pop into my head. But not necessarily in order of importance or immediacy.

One of the biggest things that I came away with my research was the need to be consistent. So make sure that the meetup goes every month and that it keeps to its format every month so that people can get used to that schedule and begin to incorporate that schedule into their life.

So we need the first or second Monday of the month, depending on the calendar.

And 4th of July falls on a Monday, we’re not having a WordPress meetup that week.

WordCamp US is the first week of December, we’re not having the meetup on the fifth cause we’re all going to be exhausted and sleeping, we’ll have it on the 12th. So we have it on the first or the second Monday.

And we have our four locations now and we meet at those locations. And we’ve, I would say we meet rain or shine, but we’ve canceled once. I think it was February or March of last year. There was an ice storm where all the schools were closing early. All the daycares were sending their children home early. And so we made the call, probably not worth talking about WordPress, if it means risking death, just go ahead and we’ll give it a pass. But we made it rain or shine and that meant that in the early years, I probably gave more talks than I wanted to. But at least I could talk about something that was of interest to people and it would enable those conversations to go on. And I haven’t had to fill in if you will in a long time because that consistency has enabled people to put it onto their calendars. And, because we roam, we get the kind of audience for people.

So, you know, I come when you’re in Phoenixville, cause I work right up the street from that. I can’t get to the other places that are too far. So we have this group better. So predictability and schedule are very, very important.

Transparency is really, really important. So making the meetup about the people that are attending. Anytime we’re going to change a direction at a topic initially for the first few years, Joe, all we talked about with was WordPress. And at some point, the group started to think, “Well, maybe we can talk about things that aren’t immediately WordPress cause irrelevant and we’ve covered a lot of grounded WordPress and we’ve educated ourselves.” And we’re ready to hear about Design as it relates to WordPress. Or workflows as it relates to WordPress development. So not, you know, come and teach us about ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, but topics that are tangential. ‘

But in order to do that at one of the meetups, we had a vote on it. And it was just a show of hands, a yay or nay. And, but the group was able to vote on. Everybody in the room got a chance to say “Yes, that’s a good idea” or “No, it’s a bad idea.” And we’ve done that around paying for the meetup. Do we want to have it for free or do we want to pay for it? You know, pay $5 for a tent. How do we want to pay for meetup.com? That’s another thing that we voted on. We talked about, I mentioned, we now have a GitHub page. We voted on that. We have a slack channel. We voted on that. And so it just gives everybody the opportunity to say I belong to this group, my vote matters. So, that kind of transparency and accountability is really helpful.

Being welcoming is really, really important. We wear name tags that really, I think makes a big, big difference. It’s a little cheesy. I get that. But people seem to like it. And when I’m late, people say, where are the name tags? So I’m clearly not ramming it down anyone’s throat. They want the name tags.

And then I think the other thing that’s worked really well for us is having a meal together. I don’t want to say that we all sit down together like a family, but that we’re at some place where we all order individually, everybody pays their own bill. But that opportunity to share food, share a drink, relax a little bit, creates an atmosphere that is more social, more intimate than just, “Tell me what you know so I can make my business or my organization or my career go faster.”

Joe Casabona: Right. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you’re comfortable enough to eat in front of somebody, you know, you’re willing to open up a little bit more, right?

Liam Dempsey: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And then making a real commitment to the community is important. For WordCamp Philly, I think the last WordCamp Philly, the meetup had extra money so we spend the money on meetup.com and we buy appetizers at the table and we’d kind of do a waste, not want not. So I try to order, we try to order less than people so we don’t have leftovers. I don’t see it some money leftover. So we made a donation from our extra money to support WordCamp Philly.

Joe Casabona: Nice.

Liam Dempsey: We bought ourselves t-shirts last summer. Again, we voted on it. I ordered some t-shirts, and we just make the time to make sure that people know that they’re welcome.

And we don’t have that guy or that gal at the meetup. We certainly had them roll through town if you will. And then it might stay for me to pursue, but then move on. We don’t force them to go. But nobody buys into their non-community focused approach. And so they, for whatever reason they see fit, they don’t come back. And that’s okay with us. We want people who are willing to be polite and cordial and social, regardless of where they’re coming from.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. And that’s great. It’s great that you guys have that. And I know that you have a lot of veterans at your meetup too, you know, it’s something that, you know, you and I have been in for a long time. I’ll usually go out of my way to introduce myself to people, especially if they’re new, you know, I don’t go to yours enough yet that I can recognize new people. I guess I’m a new person, but, at the sprint, you know, at the NPPA WordPress meetup, I would, somebody would walk in, I would introduce myself. I’d make them feel welcome. I’d ask them what they do and stuff like that. So I wouldn’t just like immediately hand them a business card or something, you know? Cause that’s not what it’s about.

Liam Dempsey: Yeah, exactly. It’s the, ‘You matter, you belong. Thank you for coming.” And it can be that simple that straightforward, and it just, it makes a big difference. Words are powerful.

Joe Casabona: Absolutely. Awesome. So, you talked about paying for the meetup, the Philly ‘Burbs Meetup is $5 a person. Is that right?

Liam Dempsey: Correct.

Joe Casabona: So, and then, and you still get, you know, 15, 20, 25 people showing up. So you voted on this as a community. Was it first of all, was it always paid?

Liam Dempsey: No, it wasn’t. The first year it wasn’t. And what I was finding was that we were growing, which was wonderful. And we would tell the restaurant we were going to be at, “Hey, we’ll have 15 people.” So they would schedule one wait staff, and then 30 people would show up. And a restaurant was like, “It’s going to be slow.” And of course, yeah, “Of course it’s going to be, cause we told you 15 and there were 30 of us.” or conversely, we would say, “Hey, it’s going to be 30” and then 15 people would show up. And then the bar would be like, “Hey, we have two wait staff.” It’s not really worth our wild after two people on staff for 15 people. What’s going up? So I talked to Brad and to Daug and to read from the Philadelphia WordPress, meet up about it. And they had just started charging and they had found that it really helped get their numbers and just make a bit of consistency between RSVPs and people who showed up on the night.

And as it turns out, the minimum charge you can have on meetup is five bucks. And it turns out that’s absolutely enough money to regulate the numbers. So we will have a drop-off. We might have 30, 35 RSVPs and we’ll have 28 to 33 people. So we drop off some, but it’s not that 18 to 30 and vice versa.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, that’s a conversely you know, with the Scranton meetup, the NPPA WordPress meetup, we would probably have about a 50% drop-off from RSVP is people would, and there were a few reasons for that I should say, but one is, we didn’t charge. One is we live-streamed it to, and you know, we determined that that was kind of a mistake because that’s not what meetups are about, as you said earlier. So we would have people RSVP and about half would show up. So charging is great. Now, so, I guess you were somebody else who fronted the money for meetup.com at first?

Liam Dempsey: Yeah. I did.

Joe Casabona: Okay. And so if somebody doesn’t want to do that, they can talk to the WordPress foundation. Is that right?

Liam Dempsey: Yes. That is indeed the case. Yeah. That’s been going out what, three, four years, two or three years, something like that.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, that sounds about right. So, they will basically pay for the meetup costs. And then you, I guess you can, you’re not charged for the meetup? I’m not really sure on the rules of that. I know we considered it, but we decided to go against that as well. I know that you guys do cause you charged for yours, but maybe we could talk about the pros and cons of having the WordPress foundation sponsoring your meetup.

Liam Dempsey: Yes. I can tell you a little bit about why we elected not to have a foundation, sponsor or meetup if that’s the right word. And basically, it came back to a conversation with the group of, you know, we’ve done it for a year on our own. It seems to work very well on our own. At the time, the meetup was only about $120 a year, and we had any given night, 20 to 25 people attending. But a group of probably around 30 to 50 active members so they would come three times out of four over a four-month period if you will. And the conversation basically came to the conclusion that for 120 bucks a year between 50 people keeping the flexibility and control within the group was the right choice for us.

So that’s why we did it. Basically, we amortize, what’s now $180 over. Now, we probably have 60 or 70 people that are regulars. That is just kind of a non-cost for us and enables us to meet in ways that are most inclusive and convenient for us.

Joe Casabona: Gotcha. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So, you can, you know, you’re proving that you can, that you know, with the right community, with the kind of rules you’ve set out or the things that you do think, you know, the guidelines I should say, you can definitely have a successful meetup. And then if you are looking for a little bit of extra help, the WordPress Foundation is there if you need them. Cool. So what are we, you know, we’ve talked about kind of where the meetup was and what it is today? Where’s it going? What are your plans for the future? Anything big or interesting, or…

Liam Dempsey: Well, with the understanding that we’re recording this the week of WordCamp US, not at all about anything except WordCamp US.

But I think for the meetup to continue to flourish as it has, we’re always looking for new speakers, new presenters. We’ve done a decent job working towards our diversity and we need to do a lot more work around that and that’s on all of us.

But as the organizer, it’s a lot on me and I’m going to spend a lot of time in 2017 reaching out to groups, people of color in particular where we haven’t been as welcoming. Or put our hand out as far as we should have as a WordPress meetup. And, we’re going to work on that.

And we may need to go find new locations as we’re growing. We set a limit of 30 per meetup, just so that most of the places we need can easily handle 30. Some start to struggle a little bit beyond that. And now we’re getting consistently 30, 35 RSVPs which means kind of that 28 to 33 attendees. So it might be, and I need to get into the car and start driving around to the Western suburbs of Philadelphia and find some new locations.

And I think I’m trying to see what we can do to coordinate with other meetups. From a speaking standpoint, we’ve got the Philadelphia meet WordPress meetup, there’s one up in the Lehigh Valley, there’s one down in New Castle, Delaware, there’s one out in Lancaster, and anyone meetup. It’s kind of, you know, at least from our perspective, no more than about an hour, hour, and 10 away.

And to be able to lend our speakers probably isn’t the right phrase, but for a Monday afternoon after Thanksgiving weekend, if you’ll let me use that phrase, to lend our speakers to the different meetups so that the speakers have an opportunity to grow their speaking experience. But also from networking in a community-building standpoint, I think that’s a huge opportunity for growth at both an individual level and then at a community level.

Joe Casabona: Awesome. That sounds great. That’s a, those are all things to really look forward to in 2017, this year, I guess, at the, when we released, right? But that sounds awesome. And, you know, working with other meetups WordPress or not, you know, there’s a lot in the Lehigh valley that are like tech kind of meetups. And talking to them, getting other perspectives is always a good thing. So, well, we are, we are banging upright against time here. So, the last question for you. Do you have any trade secrets for us?

Liam Dempsey: With respect to the meetup? I think the biggest, the two biggest trade secrets are consistency and transparency. Make it about the group. Make it about the group, Make it about the group.

Joe Casabona: All right. I love that. Cool. Well, Liam, thank you so much for joining me today. Good luck with everything this week. I’ll see you on Thursday or Friday.

Liam Dempsey: Thank you so much for having me on. It’s been an absolute blast. I love talking WordPress. I love talking to you, Joe.

Joe Casabona: Thanks so much for listening, and thanks to our great guests and fantastic sponsors. If you liked the show, please rate it and subscribe on iTunes in Google Play or whatever your podcast app choices. If you have any questions, be sure to reach out at streamlined.fm.

And finally, until next week, get out there and build something.