#WPDEVMAG is bringing the exclusive interview with Dimitar Dimitrov from WordCamp Plovdiv 2019. Dimitrov talked about this year event, held couple days ago, and he shared his experience and impressions as the organizer of WC Plovdiv 2019. Enjoy!
Give us short info about WordCamp Plovdiv 2019 and your role!?
My name is Dimitar Dimitrov and I’m the lead organizer of WordCamp Plovdiv.
This is the first WordCamp in the rich history of my home town Plovdiv, but since the event went so well and had more attendees than we expected I’m hoping that many more WordCamps will come to Plovdiv in the years to follow.
Since this was the first WordCamp to be ever made in Plovdiv we were hoping to have 200 attendees so this is the number of tickets that were initially planned.
To our pleasant surprise more than 2 weeks before the start of the WordCamp we were completely sold out, but we were able to negotiate more tickets with the venue, we booked a second room for another track of talks and at the end, we sold more than 280 tickets via our website!
How many people are in your team?
We had a really small organizers team considering the size of the event – a total of 5 people and me, two of whom became fathers roughly a month before the WordCamp started.
I would like to say a HUGE THANK YOU to all of them – Mila, Ivaylo, Hristo, Vanina and Atanas. If you want to know more about us – check out our website for our short bios.
Do you cooperate with other WordCamps?
Yes, we do! We cooperated with the organizers of all the other WordCamps in Bulgaria (that would be WordCamp Sofia and WordCamp Varna) and we got huge help from them as well! The help came in different ways – some of them became speakers, some – volunteers, others helped us find sponsors and so on.
Of course, we already promised them to return the favor so they can rely on us when the time to organize the next WordCamps in Varna and Sofia comes. 🙂
Was it hard to find local sponsors for the WordCamp?
Again to our surprise not really! We even got 7 micro-sponsors for the events – something we never expected!
I would like to say how grateful I’m towards all the sponsors of the events, starting with our gold sponsors Jetpack, WooCommerce and SiteGround (SiteGround was also the sponsor for the contributor’s day), our silver sponsors GoDaddy, BlueHost, FastComet, DevriX and Superhosting.bg and our bronze sponsors – ICN.bg, Serpact and Yoast academy!
We also had a coffee sponsor – a company called Super productivity.
WC Plovdiv organized kids camp?
Yes, we did a kids camp at the contributor’s day, which was held in the Plovdiv office of SiteGround.
We had around 20 kids that attended, created their first free blogs, published their first article and had lots of fun doing it! I’m sure that at least one of them will become a famous future blogger or a contributor to the WordPress code! 🙂Â
What would be your message (or advice) to the organizers of WordCamps all over the world?
If you are wondering if you should organize a WordCamp or not as one commercial says – just do it!
Yes, organizing such an event is stressful, but also very rewarding – you get to meet and make friends with a lot of amazing people and you learn a lot of new things!
A few pieces of advice – start the planning as soon as possible to give yourself enough time for everything; when you make a calculation how much something would take in terms of time – multiply that by two; form an amazing team – you will need them; delegate things to your team and trust them – you can not do everything yourself and you will not make it without them; don’t stress that much when mistakes happen – they will always occur, but the more time passes, the more insignificant they would seem!