The American Entrepreneur
You can’t make a baby in less than 9 months. That’s how the old saying goes. And this is true to the extent. When we launched ConveyThis Translate back in March, 2018, it was a really rough project. The funny thing was, the lead developer who had the most experience in web technology was the most skeptical about it. In his words, no one would really use ConveyThis SaaS technology on WordPress because there were plenty of free plugins on the market and knowledgeable people knew how to extract .po/.mo files and have them localized. But he was wrong. Damn, he was!
We started to build ConveyThis for normal folks like you and me. The convenient interface that ConveyThis offers saves time and money. Granted, you have to pay, but this is a trade off. You would spend more time and money learning it, while we took all of that away and simplified things. Easy to install pluging. Easy to activate. Easy to edit translations. That’s what most normal people want.
Fast forward to September as of this writing, ConveyThis project is on the 6th month of its pregnancy. It is a much more composed project which lots of cool features to use. The one feature I am most proud of is its cross platform compatibility. The widget doesn’t break any WordPress theme. It looks sleek and beautiful in any browser and works predictably each and every time. That’s what is the most important to me.
Armed with all of that, I have packed my luggage and drove from NYC to Montreal Canada. I started filming a VLOG which is posted at my new YouTube channel. Subscribe!
I have split it up into three parts: Road to Montreal, Day 1 – Pre-conference Stroll, Day 1 – At Conference.
Road to Montreal
Day 1 – Pre-conference Stroll
Day 1 – At Conference
I took my business cards and a little swag to give away during the event. It was the first WordCamp in my life where my firm physically attended, so I was a little nervous! But, nothing to fear there! As long as you can arrive safely to the event and register, you will be just fine. The folks are really friendly and awesome. It was a mix of college students and single person entrepreneurs. It reminded myself back 15 years ago when I was just getting started. Young, inexperienced, hungry of new things and technologies.
WordCamp is a great place to start. If you are a web hosting company, I personally think that sponsoring WordCamp would be an awesome idea for you. Lots of people that attend actually look for ways to host their websites. They are fresh into the CMS and your hosting solution may be very handy and timely.
As to ConveyThis Translation, this is a multilingual plugin. I think website translation and localization is an afterthought for most entrepreneurs. They reach this level only gradually and only when the pre-requisite needs are filled. Just in the Maslow’s diagram of wants and needs, you won’t be looking to translate your website, if you don’t have the website in the first place. And you won’t have the website in the first place, if you don’t have a place where to host it. And you won’t have the place to host a website, if you don’t purchase a domain name first. So you get an idea. Not so easy to pitch.
Now, few words about Montreal.
The last time I physically visited that city was back in 2012. It was during the US recession when US dollar was weak and Canadian dollar was strong. It was equal in price back in a day. Meaning, for each US dollar you were getting one Canadian dollar. The math was pretty easy, but a little less fun. However, the current situation with the exchange rate is in favor of the US. Now, if you go to the restaurant, you feel like everything is on 20% off sale. You can book more expensive hotels, each fancier food, buy better clothes. Canada is much more exciting in this sense today.
However, the one thing that I have noticed, Canada is not just bi-lingual country by constitution. Besides English and French, there are a multitude of languages spoken on the streets on Montreal: Urdu, Chinese, Vietnamese, Arabic, Albanian, Polish, Thai, Farsi, Hindi, Pashto, Tamil, Tagalog and others. These were just the ones that I’ve encountered while walking at Friday’s night at the busy downtown streets.
Another thing I’ve realized, is that social media is now the next great frontier in business marketing. It is critical to the success of every company to get as much exposure as possible. With cost per click marketing on Google and Facebook, these rivers of new customers have dried up and had become unprofitable. However, the organic search is still strong on both Google and YouTube. I’ve realized that I am not just an entrepreneur. I am an AMERICAN ENTREPRENEUR. I’ve started the firm in the US, and I am a new guy on a block what’s called business. I haven’t had a priviledge to be born in the US. I can’t run of the US president. I speak with terrible Russian accent. But I have one thing that one else can have. I am the American Entrepreneur!
