The WordPress Guide to CloudFest

TLDR — If you are in the WordPress space as an established Agency, Product Creator or providing Business to Business services to fellow WP people, you should attend CloudFest.

Why CloudFest works so well for WordPress businesses.

There's a couple of reasons why CloudFest has so much potential for your WordPress business, and it has largely to do with how the hosting market is changing, and the increasing importance of WordPress to grow their services. This in turn attracts a great group of forward thinking WordPress folks, who are looking to build partnerships with both hosting companies and other WordPress businesses.

Just look at what's been happening in the WordPress hosting space. The race to the bottom has ended. Hosting companies are aggressively moving upmarket, looking for higher value customers, better services and more meaningful partnerships. WordPress businesses sit right in the middle of that shift.

This is where you come in. If you are building products or services in the WordPress ecosystem you simply want to be at CloudFest to learn their needs, how it affects your business and meet the people in our WordPress community that can help you get there.

So what are the main differences between (bigger) WordCamps and CloudFest?

1. The Audience — CloudFest is a B2B event, meaning that the attendees are business owners, decision makers and people that are looking to do business. Luckily for us when it comes to growing their business, for them this largely means WordPress. More about that later.

We simply do not have B2B conferences for WordPress at the moment. WordCamps are fantastic, I absolutely love them, but smaller WordCamps do not have the same level of business owners and decision makers attending. The largest WordCamps almost have too many, where it can be hard to get to the right people and the right conversations. If your product or service is focused on the end user, then WordCamps are still the best place to be. You can get your product or service in front of thousands of people in a single weekend. But if you are looking to grow your network, form partnerships and be in the best position to take advantage of the changing hosting market, CloudFest is the place to be.

There's also a structural reason why business talk flows more naturally at CloudFest. WordCamps, by design, require talks to be educational and tied to working with WordPress. No sales pitches, no straight up commercial discussions. That's perfectly fine for what WordCamps are. But hosting companies and agencies that want to openly talk about growth, pricing and revenue have never really had a home there. CloudFest, with its explicit commercial focus, fills that gap without apology. As von Varchmin puts it: "Business first, we don't want any bullshit."

The Hosting Presence

What I found especially interesting is being able to form relationships with hosting companies that lack a WordPress offering or are acutely aware their current WordPress offering needs to improve to compete. They are not at WordCamps yet, because they simply lack the product and expertise to get anything out of it. But they are at CloudFest, and they are more than willing to connect with you to learn how they can improve their WordPress offering.

And the numbers back this up. CloudFest expects more than 10,000 attendees from 80 countries this year, with 300+ exhibitors. The hosting presence is massive, and unlike at WordCamps, they are there specifically to do business. Many of them are actively looking for WordPress people to partner with. That's an incredibly rare position to be in.

The Forward Thinking WordPress People

The previous two points is exactly what has attracted a lot of WordPress businesses to CloudFest. The amount of impressive and forward thinking WordPress folks I've met, and the level of conversations I've had related to strategy and partnerships I've never managed to achieve at a WordCamp. It's an interesting thing, because CloudFest is huge, but the WordPress community is still relatively small, and seems to gravitate towards the WordPress related talks and social activities. Basically you're in the luxurious position to have highly relevant conversations with your WordPress peers and take what you've learned and directly approach the hosting companies that are looking to improve their WordPress offering.

In general here's the type of WordPress people you can expect to meet at CloudFest. I will focus exclusively on the WordPress community here, to keep things focused.

• WordPress Product Creators — They are looking to form partnerships with hosting companies and their peers to bring their products closer to their shared customer pool. Sometimes they are looking to build white label hosting services, or turn their products into a SaaS platform. For Dollie we managed to talk to a lot of these creators, simply through the WordPress related talks and social activities.
• Mid & Large Size WordPress Agencies — They are looking to form partnerships with hosting companies to offer their clients a better hosting experience. This year, at least 60 registered agencies each manage more than 1,000 websites. That's the kind of room you want to be in.
• Hosting Product Managers — This is the crowd that started it all. They are the decision makers at hosting companies, and they want to know how to improve their WordPress offering. If your product or service can help them, they want to talk to you.
• WordPress Infrastructure Builders — People building the tools, the SDKs, the plugins and the platforms that power WordPress at scale. They tend to be technically minded, strategically sharp, and very open to conversations about where things are heading.

Tell me more. I want examples of why this works for me.

Sure, let me give you a couple of examples based on what I've seen work. We've been building Dollie, which helps agencies manage their WordPress portfolio and connect their agency knowledge to AI tools. At CloudFest we basically can talk to anyone and everyone, from hosting companies looking to improve their WordPress stack, to agencies looking for better tools, to product creators who want to explore partnerships. But for your business it might be different, so let me give you a couple of examples.

1. The Agency — You are an established WordPress digital agency. Where at WordCamp your goal is primarily to meet new clients and talk with your peers, at CloudFest you can look at new products and services that are in the pipeline, and cherry pick the hosting companies that are quickly innovating to meet your needs. This year, agencies attend for free, and with 150 to 200 agencies expected to be actively present on Monday alone, you are surrounded by people who share your challenges.

Tips:

• Attend the WP Business & Agency Summit on Monday. It's a full day event running across two stages with more than 800 people expected. That's your day.
• Look for the hosting companies that are investing in their WordPress offering. They want to talk to you.
• Talk to WordPress product creators. Many of them are building tools that solve problems you deal with every day.
• Don't skip the evening events. Europa-Park is locked down for attendees only, there's nowhere else to go, and that's exactly what makes it work. Deals don't happen in sessions, they happen at the bar afterwards.

1. The Product Creator — You are building a WordPress plugin, theme, or SaaS product. CloudFest gives you direct access to hosting companies that are looking for products to bundle, white label, or integrate. The hosting product managers are decision makers, not just attendees. If your product solves a real problem for their WordPress customers, you can go from introduction to partnership conversation in a single day.

Tips:

• Prepare a clear one sentence pitch for what your product does and why a hosting company would care.
• Attend the AI panels. Whether you're building AI features into your product or not, you need to understand where hosting companies think AI is heading for WordPress.
• The Hackathon alumni are a great crowd to connect with. Many of them are the technically minded people inside hosting companies who will champion your product internally.

1. The Hosting Company — If you're a hosting company looking to strengthen your WordPress offering, this is the single best event to find the agencies and product creators who can help you do that. The Summit is basically designed for this. With 60+ agencies managing over 1,000 sites each in the room, you're looking at a concentration of WordPress expertise that doesn't exist anywhere else.

Tips:

• Talk to the agencies. Understand what they need from hosting that they're not getting.
• Look at the WordPress product creators. Many of them have products that could be bundled with your hosting offering.
• Pay attention to the AI sessions. AI is changing what agencies expect from hosting, and you want to be ahead of that curve.

Sessions we'd recommend.

Here are a few personal picks from the Dollie team.

• Joost de Valk: "Optimize the Business, Not the Website." I've known Joost for close to 15 to 20 years now. He's one of the smartest people in our industry, always looking ahead, incredibly forward thinking. And one of the best people to listen to when it comes to the WordPress economy and predicting what is next. His argument is that AI has made building websites and campaigns so fast that traditional hourly retainers are becoming unacceptable, and agencies need to evolve from deliverables to outcome based business optimizers. If you run an agency, this is the talk that might change how you think about your entire business model.
• Aurelio Volle (WP Umbrella) on delivering better care plans. I'd say WP Umbrella is one of the most impressive companies that have managed to build a fantastic product over the past years. If Aurelio, the CEO, is sharing how agencies can deliver better care plans, I think you should listen.
• "What Does AI Actually Change for WordPress Hosting?" This panel is interesting for a very specific reason. If you're running a WordPress business or agency, this gives you an opportunity to understand the needs, requirements and changes happening at the hosting companies. If you are AI first and moving towards building products or client work on top of any hosting infrastructure, the people on this panel have a vision of how they're going to adapt their hosting services to meet your needs as a product owner or agency. James Lee from WebPros has a related talk on Tuesday, "WordPress in the Age of AI", that goes deeper into what autonomous agents mean for the sites you host and manage. Together these two sessions give you a pretty complete picture of where hosting and AI are heading.
• "What Can Web Agencies Learn From the IT Industry's Managed Service Providers?" This one is about structuring agencies around managed services, standardising your hosting, your WordPress management, your tools, and building recurring revenue instead of doing daily technical administration. This is close to what we're building with Dollie, because that's exactly what our platform allows you to do. Standardise your operations, make them repeatable, and get the most out of how you run an agency or even a product.
• Karim Marucchi's keynote: "The Future of Agencies: Learning from 30 Years of Navigating Change… and My Mistakes." Karim recently walked away from the FAIR project, so the title alone should make for a very interesting room.

Worth noting: the WordPress content doesn't stop on Monday. Between 40 and 50 percent of the WebPros stage on Tuesday and Wednesday is also WordPress focused, covering security, AI, and churn. The Summit is the concentrated hit, but you'll find relevant sessions across the entire event.

What we're bringing to CloudFest.

We'll be at CloudFest with something new. We've been working on an open standard called agency.md that gives every digital agency a portable identity file, readable by humans and usable by any AI tool. There will be a dedicated website and announcement post soon. If you're there and want to see what we've been building, come find us.

Practical info.

• Dates: March 23 to 26 (the WP Business & Agency Summit is on Monday, March 23)
• Location: Europa-Park, Rust, Germany
• Cost: Free for web agencies, hosting companies and WordPress professionals
• Hackathon: March 20 to 22 (the weekend before, if you're into building things)
• Size: 10,000+ attendees from 80 countries, 200+ speakers, 300+ exhibitors

The bottom line.

The WordPress community has plenty of events. It has never really had a place where the business of WordPress gets discussed openly, seriously, and at scale. CloudFest, almost by accident, has become that place.

If your WordPress business is at the stage where partnerships, hosting relationships, and strategic conversations matter more to your growth than getting your product in front of individual end users, then CloudFest is where you need to be. I've been, I've seen it work, and I keep going back.

See you at Europa-Park :-)

Dollie is Your Agency HQ for the AI Era. We have zero affiliation with CloudFest. We just think you should go.