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As the co-founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, Matt Mullenweg needs no introduction. Not content to simply stop after sending us a welcome video for WordCamp Cape Town 2014, Matt decided to come down to Cape Town in person where he was excited to be spending an evening sitting down with our local community to chat about all things WordPress. It was a fun, educational and hugely valuable evening that our community thoroughly enjoyed.

At our April 2014 meetup, Miriam Schwab spoke to us about running a successful WordPress business. Miriam is the founder of illuminea, a leading Israeli design and development agency, where she builds awesome websites, organises WordCamps and speaks at numerous events.

In many ways the theme industry has hit a bit of a plateau. I will discuss where we have come from and what we have now along with some business advice on how to run a successful theme company.

The journey of transforming communities on the Cape Flats and townships through the power of technology, storytelling and entrepreneurship. The talk will highlight the personal stories of the most unlikely innovators from these communities. It will also show how they used WordPress to turn a small community project into a global social enterprise empowering thousands of digital artisans.

This talk will explore how to’s & tactics to help you build the MVP of your next startup using WordPress. Using PublicBeta as a case study (i.e. mistakes made & lessons learnt), I’ll share how WordPress powered three iterations and stages of our initial launch, which resulted in revenue of $4000+ without actually having real product.

We all start somewhere when it comes to running our own business. But if we’re like everyone else, we discover we’re either too professional or not professional enough. Either way, the result is the same: lost profits. Come hear how to protect against it.

I run a WordPresss news website called Post Status. I’d like to share with you the story of Post Status, lessons I’ve learned, and why blogging about my craft been the biggest reason for the success I’ve had in my career so far.

This session will discuss how the audience perceive value within the WordPress ecosystem, what increases or decreases a product or service’s value, and how we each measure value. From there, we’ll dive a bit deeper into what real sustainable value looks like, how to find it while navigating the myriad of available WordPress products and how to create it, if you are a business owner or WordPress product or service producer.

Rob tells us his story on he focused going niche, starting small and continuously improved based on reader feedback to grow the loyal following it has today. He also talks about how advertising is not the only way to monetize and you need to focus on different “layers” of income streams. He tells us how consistency, quality and hard work are the key ingredients to growing your audience and increasing your market share. By focusing on growing the readership, One Page Love has allowed Rob to quit web development work and now focus on his passion project full time. If you want to hear about his lessons, tips and monetisation strategies make sure you don’t miss Rob’s talk at this year’s WordCamp Cape Town!

Gavin will take you through the history of Lazygamer from its first inception to becoming one of a select few local independent sites that received over a million unique visitors in the last month. This talk is more about content, plugins and lessons learned than actual code.