As we wrap up the first work week after WordCamp EU (and will all soon no longer be able to use the “settling back into our regular schedule” line), I wanted to take the time to share a write-up of our experience at this year’s WordCamp Europe in Torino, Italy.
The Atarim Booth & Our Experience Sponsoring
This year marked a pretty significant milestone as we transitioned from being hallway sponsors to securing a spot in the main hall. We feel this was a move that not only elevated our presence, but also stands to pave a more clear path to ROI, as we anticipate the connections we made will yield substantial results in the coming weeks and months.
Note: This is not to suggest that the same isn’t true for sponsors of the smaller booths, but the larger booth this year was beneficial in a number of ways.
Mainly this meant that we were able to run more demos in parallel – especially when more of our team was at the booth – which is a good indicator of performance when attending events and tradeshows as a company.
And beyond that, we were also far more discoverable (easy to find!). This is, of course, only logical – considering the price difference! The bigger booths are certainly a lot easier to both spot and identify. With smaller booths, it’s quite easy for people to miss the booth when 2-3 people are already standing in front of it and talking to us.
The True Value of Being A WordCamp Sponsor
After this year’s event (as likely happens every year, but this year in particular, we noticed the discussions), some companies speculated whether they actually needed to participate as sponsors in order to get value from the event.
In theory, we could have had 5-10 people from our team at the event trying to drive value from just attending. In fact, quite a few companies do this every year, and it’s obviously accepted because not every company is able to justify becoming an official sponsor.
However, in our case, given our deep roots in WordPress and its community, I think it’s safe to say supporting WordCamps as a business is a worthwhile initiative. Of course, this somewhat depends on what your company does (perhaps it isn’t a good fit for the event), but events like these require sponsors to continue happening year after year, so the mentality to just extract as much value as possible without supporting them can be dangerous.
A New Community Embedded Into WordCamps Forged by Emilia Capital
In case you missed it, or are new here, towards the end of 2022 we announced the completion of our initial funding round led by Joost de Valk and Marieke van de Rakt of Emilia Capital. And now, at (almost) every WordCamp we attend, a small subcommunity has formed that’s made up of other companies that are also a part of their portfolio.
Many of these are companies following a somewhat similar path, facing similar challenges, and all working towards the mission of making the web a better place for everyone – all in their own unique ways. Three of these companies were also sponsors of this year’s event:
- Extendify: Extendify builds on core WordPress and allows users to combine the ease of use of proprietary solutions with the flexibility of the open-source WordPress platform without the need for a legacy “page builder”.
- Equalize Digital: Equalize Digital is dedicated to making the Internet work for people with disabilities. Thousands of agencies, developers, and content creators use their Accessibility Checker software to find website accessibility problems quickly.
- PersonalizeWP: PersonalizeWP helps you track your website visitors, score, and segment, show personalized content, and increase your conversions and revenue.
Our 5-Year Anniversary and Launch of V4
The dates of the event this year conveniently coincided with two exciting milestones.
Atarim turns 5 – and so we celebrated our 5-year anniversary at WCEU. 🎂🎉
And, on top of that, we rolled out Atarim V4 the day before WCEU started.
You might say launching a big release right before running live, in-person demos is a bit daring, but it paid off massively.
V4, which has been in early access for a few weeks prior to the public release, is a huge improvement to the platform across the board.
Those users who had been testing it prior to the public release shared this sentiment with us, but being able to run demos at an event immediately after the public release was just about the fastest feedback loop you could ask for.
We were putting the platform to the ultimate test.
Could it work on terrible conference WiFi?
Could Atarim handle collaboration on any random site an attendee asks us to enter?
Honestly, the list goes on.
And let’s just say our systems handled everything without breaking a sweat – and perhaps more importantly, we were able to avoid breaking a sweat running the demos. 😅
Let’s take a look back in time for a moment.
We originally launched Atarim (as WP FeedBack) at WordCamp Europe in 2019, which was hosted in Berlin, Germany.
If you’ve attended a WordCamp before you’ll know that a good number of people that attend WCEU, attend WCEU every year.
We’re very fortunate to have had some supporters (and users) remain with us from back in Berlin, and seeing us transition from a simple plugin to where we are today – building and refining a solution that helps teams all over the world.
As for some quick notes from the V4.0 feedback we’ve gotten, it’s clear that the biggest attention-grabbers on the product side were two new features:
- Our new Chrome extension: Being able to collaborate directly in Chrome so that you can collaborate on logged-in experience, SaaS platforms, etc.
- Workflows & Automations: Being able to design your ideal workflow with built-in (yes, native) “if this, then that” automations.
#1 is not really that much of a surprise – it’s one of the features I’ve personally been most excited about, because it means that we’re going to use Atarim to work together as we build Atarim.
And #2 was expected because many teams (again, us included) also use other project management platforms such as Slack and Jira, and although we already had integrations with them prior to this release, the introduction of Workflows takes what can be done with those integrations a significant step further.
Learn more about everything new in V4 here.
Looking Ahead: Atarim Turns 5 and Continues to Grow Up (Quite Literally)
The first part of 2024 has been a transformational six months for Atarim as the product matured. We began working with companies using it in an enterprise context, from internal teams that use Atarim as a part of marketing, product feedback loops, QA, and beyond.
Our work on all fronts is very far from done, and we’re excited to keep pushing the boundary of what we can do on the product and engineering side – making sure every part of using Atarim is as delightful an experience as we want it to be for ourselves.
As with every year, it goes without saying that all of the amazing conversations and connections we made at this year’s WordCamp with WordPress developers, large brands, enterprise-grade agencies, and more are what make this possible.
Next Stop … Basel, Switzerland
We look forward to being at WordCamp Europe next year in Basel, Switzerland, and hope to see many of you there. If you’ve never made it to a WordCamp and are thinking about coming along, do it! We’d love to see you there and I’m confident you’ll love it!
Also, if it makes it any less daunting, connect with our team ahead of time and we’ll look forward to hanging out when you make it to Basel.
And in honor of being in Switzerland this time next year: Bis bald! 👋
