For the second straight year, Joe Howard will host the WPMRR Virtual Summit September 21-23. Howard is the Founder and CIO of WP Buffs.
WPMRR is an acronym for WordPress Monthly Recurring Revenue. This summit and its community are focused on helping those in the WordPress space create monthly recurring revenue for their business.
“An online conference 100% focused on actively helping as many people as possible responsibly achieve their MRR goals.”
According to the summit:
The WPMRR Virtual Summit is a 3-day online conference that helps us fulfill our mission: to actively help as many people as possible responsibly achieve their MRR goals.
Both the WPMRR Podcast and the WPMRR Community align with this mission too, by telling unfiltered stories of successful entrepreneurs and giving us a space to grow our MRR together respectively. The WPMRR Virtual Summit gives everybody who wants to join the WPMRR Community a chance to do this through an actionable but casual online event.
WPMRR is made up of the virtual summit, the community which is hosted by the Circle app, and the podcast (yours truly was on a while back).
The idea was formed out of Howard’s personal experience as a freelancer. He explained he was making some money, but sleeping on his sister’s couch.
He had to learn how to create recurring revenue for his business to make it more sustainable. As a result, Howard is dedicated to helping others do the same.
How this event works
The WPMRR Virtual Summit is three days long with some of the top speakers in the WordPress space.
Talks will be streamed to the WPMRR Community live where attendees can also have “hallway chats” with one another.
The talks will all be published on the WP Buffs Youtube channel and available for free. All presentations from the 2020 Virtual Summit are there currently.
The summit is broken into three days with focal topics each day.
Day 1: Sales & Marketing
Day 2: Operations & Systems
Day 3: Website Management
To actually attend the summit, you will need to register for their WPMRR Community site. It is free to do and interaction is easy. The summit will then be streamed into the community where everyone can watch together.
To date, three rounds of speakers have been announced.
Round 1:
- Kim Coleman
- Chandler Jamison
- Brad Williams
- Suraj Sodha
- Melanie Phung
- Daniele Besana
- Dean Burton
- Erin Flynn
Round 2:
- Kimberly Lipari
- Kyle Maurer
- Ryan Sullivan
- Joe Howard
- Augustin Prot
- Carrie Dils
- Nick Adams
- Christie Chirinos
Round 3:
- Rob Docherty
- Lee Matthew Jackson
- Jennifer Bourn
- Stephanie Hudson
- Robert Jacobi
- Sandy Edwards
- Jeff Meziere
- Alec Wines
Get all the information and where to sign up at the WPMRR website.
Q&A with Joe Howard
I asked Joe a few questions to learn more about the summit.
How is the summit different this year from last year?
Honestly, I don’t think it will be drastically different. 2020 was our first summit so we’re mostly tightening up what we could have improved last year. More of a focus on responsibly helping folks achieve their MRR goals AND doing this during a focused summit and in the community throughout the year.
How did you come up with the idea of using Circle? Did you use the Circle community last year?
We just launched the community a couple of months ago so streaming the live event here is new this year. We considered a few platforms for the community.
Slack and Discord were too intrusive into people’s communication styles and felt like a place you have to be all the time to get meaningful value out of activity.
Circle was a solid platform that allowed for more asynchronous communication, meaning people can communicate when it makes the most sense for them no matter what their schedule looks like, where in the world they live, etc.
What went into the decisions of speaker selection?
Most of the speaker outreached happened to people in my network and folks who I’d had good conversations with on the WPMRR Podcast. I also used tools like underreprenestedintech.com to make sure I was reaching out to a diverse pool of people, not just my personal network.
One big change I’d like to do in the future is to implement speaker applications. I think this will help us make the speaker pool even more diverse!
The challenge is that this does take time and energy to pull off well and with Brian (Richards) and I being the only 2 working on the summit this year, it would have proved a bit too much for us. We’re considering hiring some part-time folks to help out with this kind of project in 2022.
It’s a packed summit with three days of speakers. Will attendees need to block out three days from their work to watch the sessions?
People are welcome to attend live. I think this will be the most fun option! We plan to have lots of breaks, a stop for lunch every day, etc. If folks want to attend live, they can also add it to their own calendar here.
But we’re big on asynchronous work so like last year, we’re planning to publish all the talks on our YouTube channel for free after the event.
Wrapping it up
I have been in the WPMRR community and it has already proven to be a good group to be a part of. It is a great place to network.
I like the idea of streaming the summit into a community already established. I think it will work well.
As Joe said, all of the sessions will be free on the WP Buffs Youtube channel after the summit.
