Post Status Happiness Hour Session Twenty Five

Transcript ↓

In this episode of the Post Status Happiness Hour, host Michelle Frechette interviews Tim Bouchard, and Ron Brennan discuss the upcoming Color Code event, a conference focused on design, technology, and marketing. Unlike traditional WordCamps, Color Code aims to be more inclusive, welcoming participants from various platforms and technologies. The event will feature a diverse lineup of speakers, interactive elements like a live graffiti art competition, and networking opportunities. Set to take place in Buffalo, New York, the conference emphasizes accessibility and community involvement, promising a dynamic and engaging experience for all attendees.

Top Takeaways:

• Networking and Collaboration Opportunities: The Color Code event emphasizes the power of in-person connections. With a focus on creative professionals, marketers, and developers, the event is designed to facilitate collaboration through both formal presentations and informal networking (the “hallway track”). Attendees can expect meaningful conversations and potential partnerships that might not happen in a purely virtual setting.
• Diverse and Relevant Topics: The event will cover a range of cutting-edge topics, such as AI, content strategies, and the challenges of decoupling from major tech players like Google. These presentations, led by volunteer speakers, aim to provide valuable insights and practical knowledge, making the event a great opportunity for professionals to stay informed on industry trends.
• Affordability and Accessibility: With an affordable ticket price ($40), including lunch and the after-party, Color Code positions itself as an accessible event for professionals of all backgrounds. The organizers also plan to record sessions and make them available online, ensuring that those who can’t attend in person still have access to the valuable content.

Mentioned In The Show:

• Color Code
• Press Conf
• WP Engine
• Meetup
• Seneca One Tower
• Douglas Development
• Luminous 
• Gene McCarthy’s

🐦 You can follow Post Status and our guests on Social Media:

• Tim Bouchard (Owner/CEO, LuminusAgency)
• Ron Brennan (Managing Partner, CANI Marketing Group)
• Michelle Frechette (Director of Community Relations, Post Status)
• Olivia Bisset (Intern, Post Status)

The Post Status podcast is geared toward WordPress professionals, with interviews, news, and deep analysis. 📝

Browse our archives, and don’t forget to subscribe via iTunes, Google Podcasts, YouTube, Stitcher, Simplecast, or RSS. 🎧

Transcript

Michelle Frechette 00:00:02  And welcome to our next Post Status Happiness Hour. Today I’m joined by two thirds of the organizing team for Color Code Events, Tim Bouchard and Ron Brennan, my neighbors to the west in Buffalo, New York. How are you guys doing? 

TIm Bouchard: Good.

Ron Brennan 00:00:18  Good. How are you?

Michelle Frechette 00:00:20  I’m good. Thanks. Ron, I don’t remember when you and I met. It’s been a really long time because we’ve been doing Buffalo, and it’s probably 2015 or 16. If I’m 14? I don’t know, being honest. We go way back.

Ron Brennan 00:00:31  14 or 15 Yep. Somewhere.

Michelle Frechette 00:00:33  Yeah.

Ron Brennan 00:00:33  Your first WordCamp event.

Michelle Frechette 00:00:36  It was. I joke about I joke, I laugh about the fact that I posted on my only social channel at the time, which was, Facebook, and I called it. I said I was at my first WordPress Camp because I didn’t even remember. They were called word camps back then, but and Tim, you and I go back probably almost as far.

Time Bouchard: Almost yeah.  I met you back in 16 maybe? 

Michelle Frechette 00:00:55  So nice to see you both here today, but we’re here to talk about Color Code, which I am fortunate to be a speaker at. I’m excited to bring my, my story there, my talk about doing personal branding and how you can increase your personal branding, and there’s some basic steps to doing that and get started. It can feel overwhelming, but it doesn’t need to. So I’ll save that for the actual event. I won’t give it all the way today, but I wanted to talk to you guys about what you’re doing because it’s it’s WordPress adjacent. It’s not a WordCamp. You’re doing something on your own. Similar to Press Conf that’s going on at the end of this month, but you have managed to keep the costs down. So it’s still a fairly low investment for people to attend. And it’s not an official WordPress event, which also was a choice for you. And it’s in person as well. So it’s not an online event.  So tell me all the thought processes that went into getting this up and going off the ground. Also, I think the venue is supposed to be pretty sensational from what I’ve heard. 

Tim Bouchard 00:02:03  Yeah. For sure.Yeah. Ron, do you want to start with this? I mean, you have the bigger history, so you can go for it.

Ron Brennan 00:02:08  Yeah. So as you know, like, Ben and myself and then Andy and then Tim, you know, we kind of ran the WordPress community here in Buffalo, New York. Ran the WordCamps we started this year. You know, Michelle, you know how we do it. We’re last minute. It drives you crazy. But, you know, we kind of pull together. We decide three weeks before the event. Hey, let’s do a WordCamp. And then, you know, our handlers and everything are going crazy. This year Tim really got involved, and he’s like, you know what, guys? We’re going to do this right this year.  It’s going to be a real, you know, event that people look forward to going to. But we got to start. I mean we started last year after the event. It was crazy.

Tim Bouchard 00:02:51  Yeah. July and August. We started planning meeting for this year.

Michelle Frechette 00:02:53  Tim, you accomplished what I was unable to do for years.

Tim Bouchard: I’m very persuasive. 

Michelle Frechette 00:02:57 Light that fire under those guys and get them started earlier.

Ron Brennan 00:03:02  Yeah. He, you know, he got us motivated by always suggesting meeting places that had, like, beer and chicken wings. So.

Michelle Frechette 00:03:09  I mean, with Buffalo. You got it. Where’s your favorite wings from?

Ron Brennan 00:03:15  Favorite wings. Mine are probably Bar Bill, but I like Gene McCarthy’s a lot, too. And that’s where this kind of all originated.

Tim Bouchard 00:03:23  I like Gene McCarthy’s too, but my my secret is the Tonawanda Golf Dome.

Ron Brennan 00:03:28  Oh, those are good, too.

Michelle Frechette 00:03:30  And you guys introduced me to Elmo’s, and I really liked Elmo’s.

Tim Bouchard 00:03:33  Yeah. So Elmo’s great.

Tim Bouchard 00:03:35  Yeah.

Ron Brennan 00:03:35  Okay.

Michelle Frechette 00:03:35  We got sidetracked.

Ron Brennan 00:03:37  Sorry. Yeah.

Tim Bouchard 00:03:38  That’s alright.

Ron Brennan 00:03:38  Do we have a time limit?

Michelle Frechette 00:03:40  I mean, we try to keep it to an hour, so.

Ron Brennan 00:03:42  Okay. So, anyway, we so we got started. We got going with our, our handler, sponsor, whoever, you know, our organizing friend. And then we got into it, and all the stuff happened with WordPress, you know, and it was really around that time with like Check Box Gate. Remember that? Like, I don’t even know if that’s still a thing where you got to certify that you’re not affiliated with WP engine.

Tim Bouchard 00:04:06  It’s like pineapple now or something. Yeah. Yeah. It’s not a thing anymore.

Ron Brennan 00:04:10  And we, you know, Tim and I both run our agencies and use those, those services. So we’re like, we don’t even know if we can log into this thing. And then, you know, are we going to be hindered by people that utilize this, that won’t you can’t buy tickets unless you check that box and log in to the WordPress back end.

Ron Brennan 00:04:30  So there were a lot of unknowns. But beside all of that, we we kind of started having conversations adjacent to this anyway, and thinking it would be cool to have a conference that wasn’t so platform specific and that didn’t, you know, like, WordPress is cool and designers come, but they have to be familiar with WordPress. This thing allows any platform, any technology, any designer, marketing agencies, you know, whatever. We’ve got so many different various people that would never probably come to a WordCamp, because maybe they don’t build on. We got a guy that’s building a CMS, I think, in one of the talks. I believe so. So nothing against WordCamp, you know, we we hope to keep that going here in the Buffalo community. But we, you know, we still have our WordCamp Meetup group that that goes once a month. But this is an exciting opportunity to do something different. And we didn’t know how it was going to be received. But, you know, Tim, again, got the, you know, just started like, emailing everybody and, and it’s like, okay, well, I guess we’re doing this thing. So, you know, formed a, an organization and started putting it together. And it’s going to be a great event. So Tim can talk about, like, the venue and all of that fun stuff that’s happening.

Michelle Frechette 00:05:54  I also want to know where the name came from. So I want you to dive into that at some point.

Ron Brennan 00:05:58  To sort of the real story.

Tim Bouchard 00:05:59  Yeah, yeah. Color Code itself is. I think the idea was we wanted to lean into both sides of the equation. And you know how it goes when you brainstorm like this. We had a ton of terrible ideas. We had some that other people already taken. We had some that were just straight up silly, but the Color Code, color art design, code tech, and it just kind of it’s, you know, alliteration, it all kind of works. So.

Michelle Frechette 00:06:25  It sounds like a Dunkle thing.

Ron Brennan 00:06:29  He was part of it.

Tim Bouchard 00:06:30  Yeah. He’s part. Yeah, we all definitely thought it’s one of those things where, like, the Slack channel and the Google Drive doc just goes crazy for like, two weeks, and then ultimately, you end up, okay. There’s a domain we could use for that. Let’s go for it.

Ron Brennan 00:06:42  That’s what it came down to the domain.

Tim Bouchard 00:06:44  Yeah, I think this is what everything comes down to when you name stuff. Now it’s is there a domain that you can register for it and then get an LLC or whatever. So Color Code was really meant to one have like a fun sound and really specifically just plainly say this is design and tech. And when you think about like the marketing world, that kind of factors into everything that we do for marketing too. So it’s all encompassing. And to John’s point or sorry, Ron’s point. It really allows us to branch out topic wise and technology wise. And we were talking about the venue, the Seneca One Tower in Buffalo is the most impressive building in the city from a size standpoint that stands over the city at like 33 floors or something like that. I’d say that City Hall is still probably the most impressive building, but the tower is amazing, but it’s also home to 43 North, which is one of the largest startup incubators in the country and runs one of the largest competitions in the country.

Tim Bouchard 00:07:41  So there’s lots of startups there, and they all have marketing, tech, advanced, you know, promotion. So it really kind of fits the vibe of what that tower has tried to become under Douglas Development, which is sort of like a tech hub and an incubator hub. And MIT has invested in it for. Their, their tech department. So it it has a a great auditorium large breakout rooms for. And we planned on maybe having one good track, but we got so many speakers submissions and there were a lot of good talks. And we really did want to have a variety of topics, from design to development to marketing. And it ultimately ended up that we we had enough, to whittle it down, to whittle it down to three tracks, which was 20 speakers and 19 talks. We have one. The headline talk, is actually a two person talk in the auditorium at the end of the day, but, it really worked out. Well, we do have we have speakers coming from all over the East Coast.

Tim Bouchard 00:08:43  We got sponsors at the national level. And to to Ron’s point, by making the event a little bit more inclusive to marketing and creative. We were able to pull a lot of local agency support to you on the sponsor side, because one of the goals was, we don’t need this to be a conference that makes money. We all have jobs. We all have agencies or freelance gigs. We wanted to create something that was still accessible for students and startup people, or just hobbyists even. So by getting the sponsorship, it allowed us to keep down the ticket costs. So the tickets are around what a typical WordCamp would be as well.

Michelle Frechette 00:09:25  Nice. That makes it much, much more accessible for people, for sure. Especially when you do have people flying in from all over to attend and to speak there. I think.

Tim Bouchard 00:09:35  Yeah. And it is still volunteer speaking at this point too. I mean, there’s a few sponsors that have speaking spots because it’s part of their sponsor level. But, the challenge to having a low ticket event is it has to be very community driven. So in that aspect, it is a lot like WordCamp. It’s just that the speakers are coming from such more diverse backgrounds now, and diverse topics, that it’s just interesting to see that there are other people in these industries that are willing to do volunteer speaking, too. So yeah, that’s that’s one. The other way, to their credit, to the speaker’s credit of being able to keep tickets, down in cost.

Michelle Frechette 00:10:13  Yeah. I’m going to pull up the, the site so we can kind of talk a little bit through, first of all, who is the Bauhaus lover? Because the whole design seems very much in the Bauhaus arena.

Tim Bouchard 00:10:27  Yeah. Which that’s my my art director at Luminous, John English. This is his brainchild.

Michelle Frechette 00:10:32  I love it. It looks great. And, there’s downtown Buffalo, I recognize that.

Tim Bouchard 00:10:37  Yep. That that view right there is up main Street from the level that the event is going to be on at Seneca Tower.

Michelle Frechette 00:10:44  Oh, nice. My daughter used to live right on Main Street there. So, Let’s see. So you have right now we are in the standard, so it’s only $40 to attend. And if you sign up after the 20th, it’s only $50. And you can do that with or without a t shirt for that extra $10. I see wings, of course. You gotta have wings. The venue looks phenomenal.

Tim Bouchard 00:11:08  Yep that the tower.

Michelle Frechette 00:11:08  And then there’s the schedule, which is, you know what everybody is always interested in seeing, like, who’s going to be here? Coffee in the lobby. Happy about that, for sure. You know, opening remarks as we call the event greeting here. And then you’ve got some, Tim, you and I are speaking at the same time. How did that happen?

Tim Bouchard 00:11:25  Yeah, yeah, it’s the way the schedule works out when you have tracks like this, you have to balance and make sure that you don’t have any overlapping.

Michelle Frechette 00:11:33  Topics. Absolutely.

Tim Bouchard 00:11:35  Yeah. So there’s, there’s definitely like in the flex track, which is green when it’s heavily marketing or design related.

Tim Bouchard 00:11:40  The other talks are more content and dev. Yeah. So, it was a hard balance when you have this many speakers. It’s like doing a wedding reception table seating.  Figure out who has to be next to each other and who can’t.

Michelle Frechette 00:11:55  So you know, it is nice to go first thing though, because then you’ve ripped off the band aid and like the rest of the day, is your own, right?

Tim Bouchard 00:12:01  So yeah. And set the tone for the day too, right. So a lot of strong people leading off each track and then go from there.

Michelle Frechette 00:12:09  And you’ve got Jen Witkowski, you’ve got Lucas Manuel Alvarado, Kaitlin Bolling, Jim Brandt, Femi Lewis. Oh, I love Femi. She’s awesome.

Tim Bouchard 00:12:17  Christian Taylor’s coming too.

Michelle Frechette 00:12:20  Yeah. Christian from Craylor Media. Yep, I know Christian. He and I, met for the first time in person over at WordCamp Asia. Phenomenal. Doing so much work, in WordPress as far as news and sharing that kind of stuff. David Jackson. 

Tim Bouchard 00:12:33  Yeah, I’ll point out my buddy Jordan from Orlando, who no one’s ever probably heard of in this community, but, for the sports fans or even general marketing fans, he’s behind the viral campaigns for the Pop Tarts College Bowl Game that have happened the last couple of years with the crazy Pop Tart stuff that’s happened, and he’s doing a talk on, kind of how that idea went from a bar. The typical bar napkin story to actually, like, winning the business and being like, oh, we have to actually do something now and then. It turned out to be amazing. And it went viral, like for a week, two years in a row, two different campaings.

Michelle Frechette 00:13:09  That’s very cool. I’m looking forward to hearing that.

Tim Bouchard 00:13:12  Yeah.

Ron Brennan 00:13:12  It’s just super meta just because Color Code happened on a bar napkin, it kind of. Yeah, as well.

Michelle Frechette 00:13:17  I’m not surprised.

Tim Bouchard 00:13:18  At Gene McCarthy’s over wings.

Michelle Frechette 00:13:21  We got Coriano Harris. Hue Got This, I like that. And then, Aaron Reimann, who is down in Atlanta area, Robert DeVore, Levi Neuland, Tamara Zantell, and then the, I guess keynote?

Tim Bouchard 00:13:39  Yeah kinda of. We wanted to bring everyone together at the end of the day in one room.

Michelle Frechette 00:13:43  And Natalie Munger, with Utilizing Heuristics to Improve Design, I love that. And then you do have an after party, I think, too, right?

Tim Bouchard 00:13:49  Yeah. Yeah. Ron, you want to talk about that? It’s in the works, but there’s it’s.

Ron Brennan 00:13:53  Yeah, we just kind of locked it down. Earlier today. So it’s going to be at, Pearl Street Brewery, which is a short walk away. You know, so, like, that’s kind of the cool thing about having it in downtown Buffalo, you know, the hotels that you’re going to stay at. You know, in our past, our WordCamps, you know, we had them in smaller communities and there weren’t really hotels. So you’re always just driving to the event or getting an Airbnb somewhere. Here like we’re in the heart of the city. Like our speaker networking event, you’re going to hop on on the train and take it right up Main Street, you know? So everything’s like, right right there, very accessible from.

Michelle Frechette 00:14:35  Yeah, yeah. Here, I’ll give you a chance to thank your, your sponsors now too. So you’ve got WP Engine. 

Tim Bouchard 00:14:42  Yup WP Engine came in big and then you’ll see a bunch of the, the agencies and local colleges and stuff. And GoDaddy came in pretty big too.

Michelle Frechette 00:14:49  What’s FTN?

Tim Bouchard 00:14:51  Oh that’s Agency Fifteen. That’s a local agency. Creative agency.

Michelle Frechette 00:14:54  Nice. Luminous. Cani, and Douglas Development are collaborative.

Tim Bouchard 00:15:00  So props to Douglas. That tower. We are using the venue at no cost.

Michelle Frechette:  That’s amazing.

Tim Bouchard: I mean, when you see, when you see the venue and you see what they’re offering us to be able to do at no cost. Another reason why the tickets are low.

Michelle Frechette 00:15:15  I was going to say that’s definitely contributes to that low ticket price.

Tim Bouchard 00:15:18  It’s insane. It’s such a good location and it will really facilitate like an amazing experience.

Michelle Frechette 00:15:24  You got Mr. Smith, Parkway, Martin, Canisius University, Kinsta, and then Black Space Creative, Ninteen, Breakdance and Lighthouse Marketing. And if people are interested, they can absolutely subscribe to the newsletter.

Michelle Frechette 00:15:36  Now you have I’m going to stop sharing because I think I’ve shown almost everything. You have listed it says Buffalo. But it looks like there’s room for more events, since the Buffalo is kind of like the subset of the site. Do you have plans at this point? Is it kind of leaving it open for future ideas?

Tim Bouchard 00:15:57  It’s it’s leaving it open right now. There is a plan, but there are no plans.

Michelle Frechette 00:16:05  We the concept of a concept of a plan.

Ron Brennan 00:16:08  We have concepts of a plan.

Tim Bouchard 00:16:09  Definitely concepts of a plan. We have had interest expressed by various sponsors that they would sponsor further events, too. So this is one of those things where if we have a formula to build an event like this that operates in the same way that people are used to with WordCamps, and we can spice up the national circuit a little bit with a handful of events each year. We can build out our organizer network. And, you know, it doesn’t have to be a big project for us. We don’t have to take over the world at this point. It’s about variety. Even locally Michelle, you’re, you know, in Rochester, you’re very active in WordPress and have done WordCamp Rochester too. Do we really need two WordCamps 70 miles apart from each other?

Michelle Frechette 00:16:56  Right. And we’ve talked about having we’ve talked about having WordCamp Western New York.

Tim Bouchard 00:17:00  Or doing work on Western New York and combining efforts. Right. So, you know, like Ron said, it’s a very good opportunity to expand our horizons and take what we learned for ten years off of the WordCamp and then make something else that we can inject into potentially some different cities, too, but definitely in Western New York. And it’s something that complements WordCamp very well.

Michelle Frechette 00:17:20  Yeah, absolutely. So tickets are still on sale, which is great. So if people are interested, finding tickets, do you have. I didn’t look because I live local enough. Do you have information about hotel stays and things like that? Venue information on the site recommended hotels, anything like that? or should they just go.

Tim Bouchard 00:17:38  To those specifically there? But to Ron’s point. The venue is downtown and if you do a Google map search, you’re going to find hotels within one train stop or walking distance. And it’s buffalo. So, they aren’t super expensive. Although there is a Shane Gillis comedy act at the arena that night, so you never know who’s coming into town buying up these hotel rooms.

Michelle Frechette 00:17:58  I’ve never heard of that person, so maybe it’s not as big as I don’t know. So whenever we have an event here in Rochester, the question is, the question from outside is, will you have garbage plates? The question from inside is we’re not going to have garbage plates, are we? So the question in Buffalo is, will there be wings at the after party or what can people expect?

Ron Brennan 00:18:22  Yeah I, I believe so. We’re going to have food, you know, like food is always a part of these things. We haven’t finalized the menu yet, but you know, I generally like to provide some Buffalo staples, especially when I know we have people coming in from out of town.

Michelle Frechette 00:18:40  I’m the same way as long as it’s mild, I. I love buffalo flavor. Not so much the. Not so much the spice. So to get back to something you said very early on, which was about pineapple on pizza. The pineapple on pizza question across the world is very similar to the Buffalo Western New York question of would you ever dip a wing in ranch?

Tim Bouchard00:19:05  No.

 Ron Brennan: No.

Michelle Frechette 00:19:06  You lose your buffalo card if you do that.

Tim Bouchard 00:19:09  No, it’s always blue cheese.

Michelle Frechette 00:19:10  Yeah. Blue cheese.

Tim Bouchard 00:19:11  And if it’s done right, it’s either homemade blue cheese by the restaurant or if you have to, it’s Rudy’s blue cheese.

Ron Brennan: Yep.

Michelle Frechette 00:19:17  There you go. I’m sure Rochester doesn’t have either of those. So we take what we can get, but I think most of the time it’s Marie’s blue cheese? But, it will do. 

Ron Brennan 00:19:26  That’s another one. People use that.

Michelle Frechette 00:19:29  In a pinch. Right? So what else? What else do you want to talk about with the event? What can people look forward to? What are you most excited about? And, is the stress levels hitting yet?

Tim Bouchard 00:19:40  it’s not super stressful. I mean, like, Fortunately, because we got started early, at this point, it’s just about making sure people know tickets are there, making sure they know the event exists. You know, we’ve been doing as much daily, almost, posting about speakers and sponsors and things on, on, you know, like X, Facebook, LinkedIn, all that good stuff. But one thing we haven’t talked about yet is the, Live graffiti art competition that will happen throughout the day in the lobby. Ben, who’s not here to talk about it. So we’ll do our best to do it for him. Is running essentially a large, sticky, note easel competition where we’ll have markers and things set up out in the lobby in a certain area and people throughout the day, if they want to either skip a session or between sessions. I don’t know what the official plan is for what will be done in terms of the art that’s done, but, do something and put it up on. Yes. Art battle. Art battle. 100%. 

Michelle Frechette 00:20:39  This is answering June’s question.

Tim Bouchard 00:20:41  And it kind of. it kind of, vibes with, sticker that we have that we’re giving all the attendees and also the t-shirt option that we have, which is the Responsive by Design –  Naughty by Nature reference. Yeah, I love that. there’s a little bit of this weird subtheme that we just decided to inject in that’s kind of like urban hip hop 80s. I don’t know, it just it seemed fun, so we just went for it. But there will be art battle stuff. There actually will be some interactive voting towards the second half of the day, and there will be three winners of gift gift cards at the end of the day, too.

Michelle Frechette 00:21:17  So can I make a suggestion for next year’s t-shirt?

Speaker 4 00:21:20  Sure.

Michelle Frechette 00:21:21  It’s black. It’s just black lettering on a white shirt, but it’s open lettering and it comes with Sharpie markers. So while you’re going through the day, you can color in your own Color Code shirt.

Ron Brennan 00:21:32  I like that.

Tim Bouchard 00:21:33  Interactive.

Michelle Frechette 00:21:35  Swag.

Tim Bouchard 00:21:36  Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Bouchard 00:21:36  Interactive swag.

Michelle Frechette 00:21:37  Somebody write that down.

Tim Bouchard 00:21:39  We are. We’re getting a lot of good support from the sponsors too. So there will actually be things like swag bags when you check in. I mean, it’s just like we’ve gotten so much support from the people, that not only have done financial support, but they’re trying to make it so that the attendees have like a very top notch one day conference experience. So that’s I’m looking forward to that, to you and being able to provide that.

Ron Brennan 00:22:03  I think it’s going to be cool to have, like we’re going to have and then really never happens here. I mean, occasionally we’ll see other other marketing agency people at networking events or whatever. And, you know, some of us talk or whatever on, on online. But to have this group of people that are there in the same room together. Like I’m excited about that. You know, just what kind of collaborations and what kind of ideas can spark from just those side conversations that, you know, we’re never really in all in the same room like this.

Michelle Frechette 00:22:38  Yeah. So does that mean the hallway track is going to be exciting too?

Ron Brennan 00:22:42  Hallway tracks are always exciting.

Michelle Frechette 00:22:43  Haha! Opportunities to meet new people for sure.

Tim Bouchard 00:22:48  There’s there’s a lot of decent topics. I mean, we were scrolling through the the speaker list in the schedule. I mean, there will be AI topics and, you know, there’s the typical like content topics and there’s a few hot button topics. You know, the the new a new CMS someone is building is pretty cool. I’m going to be talking about decoupling yourself from Google because I personally am starting to hate Google. But like, you know, you have to live with it.

Ron Brennan:  How can it be done? 

Tim Bouchard: How do you play the game? I don’t know, right? Or I do know and I’m going to talk about it. But there’s a lot of decent like hot button topics that are coming up too. So I think even from a professional level, it’s not these aren’t like throwaway speaker presentations, even though they’re volunteer speakers. There’s going to be a lot of meat to this.

Michelle Frechette 00:23:31  Yeah, I realize that it’ll be hard for people to see necessarily, but the schedule is very concise. It’s also very colorful. I like that. but yeah, there’s a lot of amazing topics. I’m. I’m also glad that my talk is done early, because otherwise I have a tendency to, like, obsess about it and sit in the green room and work on it too much. And this way it’ll be done and I can go listen to other topics as well, which is a good thing.

Ron Brennan 00:23:52  Yeah, and there’s so many cool stories there, like Tamara, from The Foundry. she’s like second last talk in the in the second track there. The Future of Entrepreneurship. Like, she literally like her whole thing. And her whole career now has been to support her daughter, who was a young entrepreneur and had this product that she created and blew up into a company. And so she had to, you know, build out the support system to help her daughter turn this idea into a company. And now she’s teaching and, you know, kind of mentors young entrepreneurs. So this should be a really interesting, interesting talk there too.

Michelle Frechette 00:24:35  Yeah, for sure. There’s a lot of really, really cool stuff on the schedule. If people want to learn more here, let me change things up here a little bit. I do have a banner. I have a banner for this. Just go to colorcode.events in your browser and you will be able to see the whole schedule. Read up about the speakers and the topics, see more of what’s being planned for the day and for what’s up to the minute stuff. Go ahead on go on X. I still call it Twitter. Guys, I’m sorry, but.

Tim Bouchard 00:25:04  It’s Twitter. It’s both. 

Michelle Frechette 00:25:05  Yeah @colorCodeEvents. it’s nice that you have the, you name something that had the URL available. That’s not always easy.

Tim Bouchard 00:25:17  Not for Instagram though. Instagram. It was taken by some unused account. So it’s like I think it’s hellocolorcode on Instagram.

Michelle Frechette 00:25:24  But yeah, there’s ways around things.

Tim Bouchard 00:25:26  But there’s always something.

Michelle Frechette 00:25:28  Exactly. But yeah. And you can get your tickets right on the website as well. Colorcode.events right now they are. What did we say, $40 for a ticket? To attend for the full day. And that includes lunch?

Ron Brennan 00:25:39  Yep. 

Michelle Frechette 00:25:41  And the after party as well. So make sure that you sign up for that, especially if you’re in the area. But honestly, why wouldn’t you want to come anyway? And plus make a whole weekend of it? It’s just a hop, skip and a jump away from Niagara Falls. So you could actually, on Sunday, go and check out the falls or even Saturday night or Friday night or whatever. And, I love.

Ron Brennan 00:25:59  That we have our friends from, you know, Niagara Falls, Canada coming.

Michelle Frechette 00:26:03  Yep. Exactly. It’ll be good. I’m really looking forward to it. Yeah. Anything else you’d like to mention about it other than sign up? Come, join.

Ron Brennan 00:26:13  I think we’re going to be. We’re going to try. we’re not streaming it, but we are going to try and record every track and then, you know, get it up on a on a YouTube or make it available through the website in some way, shape or form or some combination of Tim’s cameras and our mics and whatever.

Michelle Frechette 00:26:31  Yeah, excellent. That’ll be great.

Tim Bouchard 00:26:33  Because we love torture. So we’re going to do that to ourselves. 

Ron Brennan 00:26:36  That’s right. You know how that goes with with WordCamps. You know, then the footage will be there as well. Anybody edit it and actually upload it or will it sit on a.

Tim Bouchard 00:26:47  It’s important though. It’s you know, we’ve run an event like this for ten years, but this is the first event. And we want to make sure that people can see what it was, what it was about, what types of quality topics we had and speakers. So, you know, we think that there’s something here. And if we can make sure that we’re always pushing out the quality of this, then, you know, it makes it more possible for us to potentially do another city at some point. And it’s not just in Buffalo in the northeast. It could be in the southeast, it could be Midwest, it could be whatever. You know, there’s creatives, marketers and devs all over the country. Could be in Canada, could be in Europe, I don’t know.

Ron Brennan 00:27:28  Europe, yeah, it could be Europe. Color Code Europe/

Tim Bouchard 00:27:30  It’s only a concept of a plan.

Michelle Frechette 00:27:33  Exactly.

Tim Bouchard 00:27:34  That’s it.

Michelle Frechette 00:27:35  The concept of a plan. We have a couple people watching. If you have questions. Now is your time to put them in the comments before we wrap up for the day. I guess I have. I’m out of questions, I don’t know, are you still looking for sponsors or are you still in need of sponsors? And not so much?

Tim Bouchard 00:27:51 Well, always. We’re the high, ticket sponsors are all taken up there. We’re always open to someone doing a low level if they want to grab a ticket and a low level sponsorship just to support it. We’ll always welcome that. So there’s still time to do that, but will it? It’s not critical for the event. It’s all set up, ready to go. We’re just get people on the tickets, get people the event. We’re going to have a great time, listen to some quality talks, meet some cool people, then do it again.

Michelle Frechette 00:28:20  Sounds good. I’m looking forward to it. I will be there bright and early. So are you coming.

Ron Brennan 00:28:25  Your coming  the night before right?

Michelle Frechette 00:28:28  I was planning to. I don’t have anybody in the area to help me with my scooter at the hotel. That’s what’s stopping me from coming out the night early the night before, so I was going to drive in super early on Saturday.

Ron Brennan 00:28:38  Okay.

Michelle Frechette 00:28:40  But we can always talk later. If you know somebody that is in, is around and can help. But otherwise.

Ron Brennan 00:28:45 That’s crazy we are here. I say that we’re we’re here like, you know, we were talking a little bit earlier on about your first WordCamp in Buffalo. Yeah. And, so that was the back in the good old days when Ben used to sneak, like, 150 people into the Canisius cafeteria, and that’s where we had the WordCamp. So that was.

Michelle Frechette 00:29:08  We’ve come a long way, baby.

Ron Brennan 00:29:09  That’s right. That’s where your first one was. Right at Canisius?

Michelle Frechette  00:29:13  Yeah.

Ron Brennan 00:29:14  I’m pretty sure that’s where I met you at Canisius. Yeah. And. Yeah. And then I found out after I didn’t know this, but I was like, I thought we had permission. And Ben’s like, no, nobody. I’m like, you just had 150 people show up here. And nobody questioned?

Michelle Frechette 00:29:27  Nobody blinked.

Tim Bouchard 00:29:29  Yeah, everybody knew about it but Canisius. But it was cool. It was a good event.

Michelle Frechette 00:29:33  It was like a it was a good event.

Tim Bouchard 00:29:35  I met my first developer, Tommy, who is now our current developer, again at that event at Canisius. He was just graduating from school, actually, through one of Ben’s programs. And that’s the type of thing you can do. It’s a good recruiting place, good networking place. It’s a good learning place. And genuinely, like, we know when this community gets together, whether it’s WordPress or marketing or creative or just that side of it, it’s it’s always good people. So yeah, we look forward to bringing those people together.

Michelle Frechette 00:30:01  Will you have a job board people can write openings on, and people who are looking for jobs like we do some events?

Tim Bouchard 00:30:06  You know, I thought about that and we haven’t set anything up. we do have a Slack channel, or property, whatever it’s called workspace that we have set up that we’re going to invite all the attendees into, probably after that 4/19 deadline so we can ramp up for two weeks and people can start chats in there and stuff.

Michelle Frechette 00:30:26  Sounds good.

Tim Bouchard 00:30:26  Because we want to just bring people together as much as possible.

Michelle Frechette 00:30:30  Yeah, I think that’s awesome. I want to thank.

Ron Brennan 00:30:33  Designers, developers, just any anybody that’s interested in, you know, learning more about some of the cool things that are being done or can be done, like this event, you know, it’s it’s it’s a great opportunity to network whether you’re looking to expand your career. You know, if I was in school as a computer science or developer or a, you know, a graphic designer or something right now, like this is an event, I would probably you’re going to have a bunch of the top marketing agencies in Buffalo on hand at this event, and it’s a great opportunity to expand that network and and just get out there.

Michelle Frechette 00:31:16  Absolutely, and if you even are thinking about it like I’ve been asking women like, you know, advice for people who are thinking, women who are thinking about joining WordPress and joining tech. So, I mean, if you have an inkling or want to learn a little bit more about it and the kinds of people involved, it’s a really inexpensive ticket to spend the day networking with folks and learning as much as you can.

Tim Bouchard 00:31:37  Yeah, and hopefully the weather cooperates with us. It’ll be May. May can be very nice in Buffalo. It could also be not nice. Who knows?

Michelle Frechette 00:31:45  I mean, we had snow yesterday.

Tim Bouchard 00:31:47  I’m hoping we can show off the city because it, you know, when the weather breaks in the city, it’s one of the best ones to to visit in the summertime. But there’s good people here, and we’re in a good spot downtown, so.

Michelle Frechette 00:32:01  Absolutely. Well, guys, don’t go anywhere. I’m going to go ahead and end this. But I want to talk to you for just a couple of minutes before we go. Thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate learning more and and being able to share this event with people through Post Status. if you are listening, go to colorcode.events for more information. And I don’t know who’s going to be here next week, but I will have another Post Status Happiness Hour live next week and we’ll be here to chat with everybody.

Tim Bouchard 00:32:28  Thanks. Yeah. Thanks, Michelle.

Ron Brennan 00:32:30  Yeah.