AGENCY inTELL: On The Scene at PressConf 2026

I think of it as my love letter

to the WordPress

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community, especially the business

community in WordPress.

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There's a lot of turbulence

in the WordPress community at the moment.

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There's a lot of turbulence in digital

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marketing and software

and everything in the moment.

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This is my conference.

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Every year I'm going to be here.

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Hey, Robbie.

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Hey, Roger.

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We're here at Press Conf,

and we've got one of the main organizers.

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Raquel. You're everywhere.

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You're at all the events, girl.

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Do you like to go to events?

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the whole purpose of press conf

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is for a very simple way

to put it for personal growth.

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I'm a firm believer that when we're healed

and whole from the inside out.

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We then can implement

amazing business strategy.

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so at press conference

it's about personal growth and healing

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disguised as business.

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Okay.

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Don't tell anybody. Don't tell anybody.

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My number one is to see people

individually field

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and inspired and challenged,

because I know that will affect

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what they do in their business

and on their business.

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I think of it as my love

letter to the WordPress community,

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when people show up, it feels like

they're coming to my birthday party.

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but in actuality, you get the gifts.

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So what made you come back?

Press conference.

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Such a great environment for just talking

to other folks in the WordPress community

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who want to chat, business and chat

very openly about it as well.

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with an event like press conf.

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It is so much smaller.

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There's 120 100 people.

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It's a much smaller event.

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It's over several days and you're going

to have multiple opportunities

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to be a human with these people

when I have been to two word camps

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like WordCamp Asia a few years ago

in Taiwan, it was so awesome

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to run into people and have chats,

but then they were always fleeting.

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I always found

it was really hard to really catch someone

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long enough to have a good chat,

but press conf keeps throwing you back

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into conversations with people

because you just keep running into them.

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It's the right size

for actually having enough people

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that you don't have to talk to everybody,

but you have the opportunity to

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it. Breakout groups are easy.

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Like it just happens naturally.

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It's it's at smaller curated community

of people that are here on purpose.

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It's filtered.

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And you have multiple opportunities

for like, hey, let's let's go get lunch.

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and there's tons of food around here.

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be a human first?

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Not that I wasn't a human,

but when we see people,

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we sometimes get into business mode real

quick and like, oh, I hate small talk.

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I was like, sorry, but

we're here in person and you do need to

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ask human questions like, be a person

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first is one of those no BS.

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Like that's where we start.

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Show up your whole self,

not just your company.

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Don't.

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Don't lead with the business card.

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Hey, I like to hand you like.

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Stop it, stop it, stop

it was the authentic group of people

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and just the communications.

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Everything was very authentic

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both in the sessions, but also just,

you know, in the hallway type thing.

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I felt like I had a much better pulse

of where everyone was at, it definitely

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had that intimacy that, you know,

some of the other conferences don't have.

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Yeah, I think that it's probably

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been my favorite software conference

I've ever been to.

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there was a lot of crying,

which was surprising to me.

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But I think, like in between the tears,

the context of the

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the the the, the talks were very different

than the other,

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like word press conferences

and other just conferences in general,

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like marketing ones.

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I don't know,

it was like stripped down, vulnerable.

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The F word was said a lot, and I was like,

these are my type of people,

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you know, like,

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I don't want to hear some regurgitated

like, this is your marketing plan.

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This is the funnel type of stuff.

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So that was interesting.

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Valuable conversations

with product owners, hosts,

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smart people, and WordPress.

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I am not the most technical guy,

so I just love chatting

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with everyone here

and learning more about the ecosystem,

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You've been involved with the Phoenix

WordPress community for a long time.

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What is it about Phoenix and WordPress

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that creates this culture

where people love coming?

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They people travel here

from all over the world

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I think there's a legacy

that we're fortunate to have.

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I mean, we had some of the best word camps

back in the day.

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One of the earliest word

camps was at Word Camp Phoenix.

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I was not even in the community

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at that point,

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That was one of the very,

very first word camps.

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we have a lot of tech in the Phoenix area,

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so there's a lot of tech minds

There are some local cities

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in the Phoenix area that are invested

in supporting tech agencies.

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We have this group called yes, Phoenix.

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We have co-working spaces

that are all really

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supportive of entrepreneurs

who are working in tech.

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And so that makes it

I think we have a great pool of people

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who are doing WordPress

or are doing websites.

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One of the things when we do a word camp

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or any kind of event,

we want people to feel welcome.

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We want newbies

who've never been here before.

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We want them to

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feel like they have a spot here as well,

and we talk about that as a team.

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It's very intentional, and so we really go

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out of our way to try and be that

welcoming community.

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There's a lot of turbulence

in the WordPress community at the moment.

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There's a lot of turbulence in digital

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marketing and software

and everything in the moment.

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How does an event like Press Conf help to

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help you find like your footing

and grounding?

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first year was about bringing

the community together.

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and we were telling people about it

at the beginning of word

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camp us

the first word camp us in Portland,

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before things changed radically

in the WordPress community.

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With Matt speech on the state of the word.

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then all of a sudden

we had this major bomb go off,

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which then made this conference

even more critical.

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And so it was really about healing

and about relying on each other

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and about showing

that we can rely on each other.

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We can have hard discussions

and have them in a healthy way.

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it's been incredibly helpful,

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especially this year,

just to hear other people sort of defuze

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the situation or the fears a bit and say,

look, WordPress is not dying.

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You know, hearing agency owners

say we're not losing clients like crazy.

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Yes, there are some concerns

and things to work through,

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and the landscape is shifting a bit,

but hearing that

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from those business

owners puts me at ease a bit,

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because I'm an interesting spot

as a full time creator.

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I'm like, I don't know what's happening

until I have these conversations.

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I just hear rumors of,

oh, it's really bad market shares,

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you know, being taken up and everyone's

moving the vibe coding.

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And I'm like, is that true?

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I don't know.

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So I think just talking to people who are

in the trenches has been really helpful.

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running an organic marketing team,

I like to share my opinion a lot.

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I like I was joking around,

the AI search has been my personality

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like for the last few months.

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So I want to talk to other people

like what are they doing?

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Is it the same thing?

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Are they seeing the same things as me?

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So I like having conversations like this.

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what I'm dealing with

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is centralized just me or is it our niche

or is it the entire landscape?

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my number one goal is mostly

just to hear what everyone else is doing.

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You know, learn from that and bring that

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back to the agency

and to the product side.

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it's more about trying to understand

where things are going and

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being able to adapt to it, I almost didn't

come this year, to be honest.

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My wife had to kind of convince me

and nudge me to do know I told my wife I'd

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probably know about 50, 60% of the people

that are going to be there.

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I love going the first year because I

got to meet a lot of other product owners.

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I got to learn a lot

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from them, make connections, So

it felt like I had made those connections.

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What more could I get out of now

that I'm back here again, I'm like.

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I'm very much glad I came,

because then it's like that.

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It's that, you do forget that

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talking with people in person

is really helpful.

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That there is a different level to it.

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And being able to talk with people

who understand what you're doing,

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what your goals are, what you're

trying to achieve, they understand it.

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They've either been through it

and have succeeded or been through it

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and failed, and can talk to you about it

on a personal level,

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on a more direct level,

because here in person,

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you feel more willing

to talk about the details

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as opposed to maybe in a Twitter

DM or an email or something like that.

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You're okay.

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I see that you're a real person,

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so I'm willing to actually

have a real conversation with you.

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you go down in the lift and you head out

to, you know, to the talks

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or going out to grab a coffee.

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You constantly running into people and

picking up the same conversation threads

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and then maybe grabbing a drink later

or something.

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So it allows you to really go

that step further than what you can

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at other WordPress events,

because you can keep

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diving deeper into conversations

at length with people.

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there's the hill that we can go and hike.

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And I think we ran into each other

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hill last, last year

and ended up having coffee.

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And so the serendipity

of just running into people

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and running into the same people again,

and being able to pick up

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those conversations is really obviously

AI is huge and it's kind of hard

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not to talk about it or address it,

and it's constantly changing.

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And I feel like whatever

we were doing last month

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with AI to help us with our businesses

is probably something new

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or completely antiquated at this point

today.

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Then, of course, I come back to

what are you doing for your own

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personal health?

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That then will help you implement

better business practices.

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those old tools were built

for different paradigm.

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Now we are looking at tools

that are built for AI first agencies.

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We need a new set of tools

how do you stand out?

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Is your crowdsourcing your solutions

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to be better than your competition?

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And you come to an event like that

to meet eye to eye need

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and NE where hey, what's I'm

struggling here.

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What are you guys doing?

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Matt Cromwell was talking about, you know,

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your teams are going to be smaller,

more efficient.

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Well, I'm a team of one.

I can't get more efficient than one.

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What you know, what I liked about

Katie's is also like,

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this is what worked for me,

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and where I was in my life

is how she kind of presented it.

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And I feel that heavily,

because that's something

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how I've always structured my business

for like the last many years now is

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I want to the idea of like a lifestyle

business.

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And I don't mean that's

because I want to sit on a beach

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and do all that kind of stuff.

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It's a business

that wraps around how I am as a person,

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and what works to my strengths,

and what makes me happy and excited

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to get up in the morning.

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I think biggest takeaway

was that it's okay

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to structure a business

around your lifestyle.

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I've had this tension

in my own business of

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do I need to cater my lifestyle

to the business?

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Is it okay to say, well,

I don't know if I want to work

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12 hours a day,

I have sort of reframed AI as a tool

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to treat almost as a team member

rather than a business executive,

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and I think that's

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an important distinction to make,

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because a lot of people

have been leaning on AI as like,

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I just ask it what to do, or it's

just going to come up with stuff for me.

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And that's where a lot of the fear

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mongering comes from, of

AI is going to take over the world

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and replace my business,

and I don't think that's actually true.

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I think you have to treat it

as an employee, a team member.

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So you still have to have a plan

to give it and say, can you help me

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with this?

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it's kind of like

getting a more affordable employee,

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but it's not necessarily

a business partner or executive or leader

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who's just gonna like,

take things and run with it.

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Excellent. I want to just give

a quick answer for you.

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You do not have to work 12 hour days.

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Please stop working 12 hour days.

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Good to know.