Episode 151 – Dan Maby and Michelle Frechette

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A Conversation with Dan Maby and Michelle Frechette

Dan and Michelle have been working together to make WordFest Live be a top notch, world-wide WordPress conference. We talk with them about it works and the difficulties of making a global event happen.

Show Notes

Website | WordFest.Live

Twitter | @danmaby

Twitter | @michelleames

Episode Transcript

Topher: Hey everyone, my name is Topher.

Cate: And I’m Cate.

Topher: And this is Hallway Chats. Our guests today are Dan and Michelle. Welcome.

Michelle: Good to have us.

Dan: Hey, good to be with you.

Michelle: Absolutely.

Topher: We’re glad to have you. This is our first Hallway Chats since we took it over. So you guys are very special in that regard.

Michelle: Very honored.

Dan: What a privilege!

Cate: Or victims. I’m not sure which one to go with. But we appreciate your patience and willingness to put up with us.

Michelle: It’s okay to be a guinea pig sometimes.

Cate: Guinea pigs are adorable. So, Michelle, speaking of guinea pigs, you set yourself up nicely, how about if you go ahead and tell us a little bit about yourself, where you live, what you do?

Michelle: Sure.

Cate: Anything, you know.

Michelle: As you said, I’m Michelle. I live in Rochester, New York. It’s summer here now, but it’s not as summary as it might be for where some people are listening from. I am the director of customer success for GiveWP by day, and I’m a volunteer and on the board of Big Orange Heart outside of that, which just kind of permeates all of the time, so day, night, whatever.

In addition to that, I’m the co-founder of Underrepresentedintech.com and I’m a podcaster myself as the podcast barista over at WPCoffeeTalk.

Topher: So Michelle, how can we help you find more things to do?

Michelle: Well, you know, I still have a few hours at night when I have insomnia. So if there’s something you need, just let me know.

Topher: Excellent.

Cate: Insomnia. I need to get that.

Michelle: I don’t recommend it. One star. Not recommended.

Cate: Dan, why don’t you go ahead and tell us [00:02:00] about yourself, where you live, what you do.

Dan: Sure. I am the founder of Big Orange Heart, a mental health charity that supports and promotes positive wellbeing and mental health within the remote working communities. I am also the founder of a digital agency called Blue 37 based here in London in the UK. And just generally keep myself very, very busy across the WordPress community. I’m very passionate about the people side of our wonderful community.

Topher: I know you’ve been involved with Big Orange Heart. WP&UP is what it was before. Can you tell me when that started and when it turned into a full-time job?

Dan: Good question. Well, the idea of the charity started around 2013, I believe. I was actually in a position of struggling myself. I was wanting to connect with like-minded people to be honest, and realize that I was in quite a dark place, working alone in an environment where I just didn’t have people to interact with on a regular basis.

I’d come out of that kind of office environment and was working from home. And I just saw my mental well-being struggling to be honest. That’s really where the idea of I figured if I was struggling, certainly there are going to be other people out there as well that were also in a similar situation.

Topher: Sure.

Cate: Yeah. Definitely.

Dan: That took some time from that point on to then start to evolve this into Big Orange Heart, the nonprofit that it is today.

Topher: That’s really cool. I like it. Michelle, how did you get involved?

Michelle: So I work for GiveWP and we have a donations plugin. [00:04:00] And Matt Cromwell was talking about doing some things. WP&UP was doing a summit—The Do Summit Good, and Matt said they need some people to be on this panel, “and so I’d like to have you and me.” I honestly can’t remember who the third person was. It might have been Taylor.

So I was on that day, and I was like, “Oh, this is really cool.” So I looked more. And of course, they were trying to raise money that day, so I signed up as a recurring donor. Then I was like, “I wonder how I could be helpful.”

Topher: Because you need more things to do.

Michelle: And I said, “Is there anything I can do to help? I do a lot around fundraising.” And so I joined the fundraising team. Then from there it was suddenly I was doing a lot more. I’m not really sure how that slippery slope happened, but I am very grateful for all the work that I am able to do there.

We often talk about mental health as far as remote work. I have a thing that Caitlin White made for me. It’s on my nightstand. It says, “Find your tribe, love them hard.” And when you do remote work, you don’t necessarily have that group of people that you see on a daily basis, especially as a single person. I have cats at home and they’re not good conversationalists.

So WP&UP, as it is now Big Orange Heart, turns out that’s my tribe. And being able to be part and giving back to that actually fills my soul in a way that I haven’t found in a lot of other places. I love the WordPress community, and this is one way that I can absolutely help give back.

Cate: Well, and I think if you’re someone who’s ever felt that loneliness of being at home, I mean, I felt that as a single mom… oh, not a single mom, but you know, stay-at-home mom. I felt like a single mom a lot of times.

Topher: That’s part of the problem.

Cate: Right. Whenever you’re [00:06:00] in a role where you have to be focused elsewhere and it doesn’t necessarily include other adults people, that it’s just… you know, once you’ve felt that, it’s hard not to give out to other people who have felt that as well.

Michelle: Absolutely.

Cate: I think it’s interesting that you got started with Do Summit Good as well, because really that was HeroPress’s move into kind of the Big Orange Heart world as well. We opened up a little bit there about some of the struggles that came with getting HeroPress up and running and the challenges to a family of trying to start a nonprofits sort of thing and do community work while balancing family work, while balancing work work. It’s a lot of plates to keep spinning some days.

Dan: I’d say that yeah, I think that Do Summit Good event has got a lot to answer for, because actually, that was also the seedling for WordFest Live.

Michelle: It was. Absolutely.

Dan: I think this subject we’re touching on here about having the environment, the working environment that we’re in, it can be very challenging sometimes, particularly if you’re ever in an environment where you are on your own and you don’t have your coworkers, there aren’t other people around you.

I know when I was in an office, I would have people sat opposite me, people sat next to me, people sat around and I would just verbalize stuff that was going on in my mind. And I might be working on something and I might even be chatting away about it. But without me realizing it, that’s allowing me to process those thoughts and process those issues that are going on in my mind.

And just often I certainly found myself I wasn’t able to do that. I’m not somebody who will sit and talk to myself. I need other people to be able to talk to. Just as you say, trying to find your tribe.

Topher: Yeah. I’m a remote worker for 11 years now. But when COVID hit, I was working for a company that was [00:08:00] primarily not a remote company. I was remote, but they had probably 800 employees that were office employees. And in one day, they all became remote workers. And it was a huge shock. Just like when I did it, I thought about it, I prepared for it, I read about it, I had some idea what I was getting into. But places like a Big Orange Heart have been huge for that whole community of people that were suddenly thrown into it.

Dan: Absolutely.

Michelle: With COVID, one of the things that it wasn’t just about suddenly you were a remote worker. Suddenly you were a remote worker, if you had children, you were homeschooling or helping homeschooling your children, you were now ordering groceries or not… you know, you could remote work from home and still go to the park and go to Walmart or stick in a show or go to a restaurant. And suddenly all of those things were moved to all at the same time.

So it wasn’t just a situation of a company decided to become a remote company, but we all became incredibly remote and incredibly isolated. And it was about that time that we made the decision to switch from being… maybe a little bit before that, but to go from being WP&UP to be Big Orange Heart and be a little more inclusive of the remote work community in technology not specifically focused on WordPress. I know Dan can talk a little bit more about that too.

Dan: Sure. I mean, actually, we set out working specifically within the WordPress community. I mean, our heart is very much within the WordPress community. Nothing has changed there. However, there had always been an intention to evolve and grow the services and the delivery of services from the organization into a wider community. [00:10:00]

The remote working community had always been that focus for us. Partly because that was where I was at. I had those issues around being a lone worker, a remote worker. But of course, you have to start somewhere. So it’s very, very passionate about the WordPress community but equally as… it was actually right on the cusp of the pandemic really kicking in for us certainly here in the UK in terms of the timelines.

That was when we took the decision to bring that timeline forward for the transition into a wider focus and more inclusive organization. So not only did we go into this situation of having to deal with a pandemic, we saw a 300% increase in demand on the services of the charity at the time. We also decided that moment would be the best time to rebrand, I think go through a rebrand.

Topher: Brilliant.

Cate: But that all makes sense because a lot of ways WordPress itself is moving into a broader spot in the overall web economy, where as it goes more headless, more people are going to be embracing it from an outside standpoint. We see more companies coming in and being interested in WordPress. So having something set up that is inclusive to anybody who’s struggling in this area who meets the remote worker require… like this falls into, it just makes sense to expand right now into something bigger.

Topher: Yeah.

Cate: And with that, you moved the summit into… So Do Summit Good became WordFest. And for that, you had to come up with some new technology. And like my husband would never do, you [00:12:00] didn’t take something out of the box and use somebody else’s. You had to build your own.

Dan: I’m laughing. I’m not sure if that’s hysterical or not.

Topher: I’m curious about the process you went through to decide, should we build our own or use something off the shelf? I’m kind of interested in the specific tech used. But that could go on forever and we don’t have all that much time. So I’m more interested in about the decision-making…

Cate: I made a note about that actually that time could go on forever.

Topher: Stop talking here. So I’m interested in the process of decision-making about why you decided to build your own and all that.

Dan: Really, it was born out of the need of the community, if I’m honest. We’ve run for a long, long time several WordPress focused events. At the time we were running our regular monthly events. We were delivering WPLDN, the WordPress London meetup, for example. And in the February of… I’m not even sure what year. All the times blended into one.

But at the start of the pandemics at 2020, before the UK Government had placed us into a national lockdown, we had our event at the end of February and as an organizing team, we had a conversation about the what was happening. And we decided to be to err on the side of caution and not deliver any more in-person events until we had a better idea of what was going on. Little did we know that that was going to go on for as long as it has done.

But we wanted to continue to enable our community to come together even though we couldn’t do them in person. So the following month, the last Thursday of the month, as we always do for WPLDN, we organized an event but we decided to run it on Zoom. And within seconds of running that [00:14:00] first event on Zoom, we realized that Zoom was entirely the wrong piece of software to deliver an event.

It’s an amazing bit of software for meetings and for the kind of smaller conversation. But when you try and get 60, 70, 80 people into a Zoom call, nobody has the opportunity to speak. It’s just not an environment that lends itself to connecting. So we set about immediately after that event may have been actually during that event we were looking at alternative ways to deliver it.

And being a big open source advocate, we wanted to look at an open source solution. There were several proprietary solutions that were available. But again, this was all very early and there were lots of companies that were very quickly scrambling to develop something that would enable these kind of online events to happen. And we just couldn’t find something that was we really felt was fit for purpose at that moment.

There’s lots of these platforms have evolved into fantastic solutions since then. But again, it was about how can we develop something that is built on open source technologies that enables us to make sure that we have ownership over the product and the service that we’re delivering, make sure that it is privacy-focused. You know, there are so many issues in relation to some of the proprietary services that are available.

So we stumbled into Jitsi, which is an open source video conferencing project, which became the backbone of what we’ve developed since. And it’s been quite a considerable journey.

Topher: So it wasn’t 100% from scratch?

Dan: No. We’ve actually built a custom app that [00:16:00] has Jitsi at its heart in terms of video conferencing. Then we’ve got our table functionality of various other bits. We go through some work at the moment to actually convert the entire platform. So if you’ve attended an event on the Big Orange Heart platform before, what you’ve seen there, we’re currently going through the process of converting that into a WordPress plugin.

Topher: Oh, nice. Nice.

Dan: So we want to make sure that it is available for communities out there to be able to access as well.

Topher: At the risk of getting too deep down the rabbit hole, did you actually fork Jitsi and like add to it or change it? Or is it just a module in your larger platform?

Dan: We have actually forked a version of it. However, it has presented us with some challenges along the way.

Topher: Always does.

Dan: It’s been a learning curve. But it’s been a really interesting project. We’ve had some fun times.

Cate: I’m finally laughing here hysterical in the background having had these conversations so many times over the last 25 years.

Topher: Tell me again why you built it yourself?

Dan: There’s been several kind of unintended consequences across this if you like. We’ve had a fantastic team of volunteers that have supported the project in various ways. And that team of volunteers has really evolved into this little kind of micro family, if you like, of people that are actively working together on a daily basis, giving time into the organization and enabling this platform to grow and evolve.

In the first 12 months that we delivered events on the platform, we had over 12,000 registered attendees come through it, which was totally unexpected for us. We never imagined, if we go back 12 months ago, that we would be in that situation of having those kinds of numbers through a platform that [00:18:00] we as a small kind of micro community within the organization that we create.

Topher: Open source takes you in some interesting and surprising places.

Dan: It absolutely can.

Cate: Very true. So that’s, like the technology side, are some of the challenges that you’ve faced trying to put on a global conference with global speakers, and global sponsors, and global volunteers. So Michelle, could you dive into a little bit more of maybe the people side of putting on a global virtual event?

Michelle: Absolutely. At the risk of deflating him a tiny little bit, one of my biggest challenges is pulling Dan back from the edge sometimes. I think of us as the yin and yang to a lot of what happens at Big Orange Heart and WordFest because he’s like, what do you think about this? And I’m like, “I think you should table that till next time.”

Cate: I also have similar conversations believe it or not..

Michelle: As Dan said, our group of volunteers, our group of organizers, specifically, and of course, the volunteers that we bring into the different parts of not only WordFest but Big Orange Heart are phenomenal. Just the group of people that have assembled, the people we’ve asked to join us, the people who’ve asked to join us are just… it’s just a phenomenal group of people, and I couldn’t ask for a better family of people at Big Orange Heart, for sure.

For me personally, some of the challenges are the fact that when you’re looking at a global event over 24 hours and Cate’s laughing because she knows I’m gonna say that I’m time zone challenged…

Cate: It’s so hard. It’s so hard.

Michelle: Last year was the first time I was doing work not only with Big Orange Heart, but with WordPress in general that the concept of UTC, I’ve never heard of UTC as a time zone before. I’ve heard of [00:20:00] Greenwich Mean Time, I had heard of different time zones, and then all of a sudden everything was being measured in UTC.

And I have to have a special website hotlinked so that I can see what time it is in any particular time zone based on the UTC time zone. And even that I’m like, “Well is it daylight savings time or is it not daylight savings time? And what does that mean?” And I show up an hour late or an hour early to things. I don’t think I’m the only person who is challenged by time zones. Evidence…

Cate: No. And we set things up right over the time change. Like both events were planned at each of the time change. We are not good at this.

Michelle: And I rely on Dan because he’s in the UK. That is kind of like the Greenwich Mean Time thing and UTC is like based right over there. So I rely on him. And even he and I, this week, both realized that we had set up all of the schedule in the wrong time zone and we had to come back and fix all of that. And so we’re constantly double-checking and triple-checking things.

But the challenge also comes in how to—and God bless Cate, she is the lead organizer for marketing. But how do we market an event that’s a global event, that we’re marketing it to people in 24 different time zones basically around the world and still having one website that says, “This is how you get involved?”

When we did it in January, people in my local meetup who I have been touting the event two were like, “Oh, I missed it. I thought it started on the 21st.” I’m like, “Well, it did, but in UTC it started last night.” Like you’re trying to log in at the tail end and you miss 24 hours of an event because you didn’t understand time zone. Like, I was speaking with authority like I had any clue either, right.

So part of the challenge is making sure that people understand when events are happening, [00:22:00] how the events are happening, communicating properly with our speakers. This time we’re including interviews for community interviews, we are including some wellness talks, and we have some exciting things happening that way. I’m not going to give away all the exciting news that’s coming up. I’m gonna let Cate have the excitement of sharing some of those things out over social in the next few weeks.

But we do have some exciting things that we’re doing with WordFest that are different. But all of that means that we need to manage a 24-hour event with people who aren’t all physically in one location. So that means that coordinating that can be a bit of a challenge.

Also, just the fact that we are completely volunteer. Anybody who’s ever run a WordCamp understands what it’s like to work with 100% volunteers. But when you’re running a WordCamp, you tend to be people who are again, can get together for coffee and can have dinner together and make those kinds of plans.

Instead, we are in all those different time zones because we are a global agency as well, or organization as well. And so having the challenge of coordinating people, coordinating times, and making sure that it all comes together. And that at least looks like a well-oiled machine, even if we know that there’s chewing gum and twine holding some of us together at the end.

And then, of course, the last part that is a challenge, it’s fun. But the fact that people like Dan, you, me, will be awake for 40 hours or more because we’ll work the day before we’ll be prepping for and then we’ll be awake for the entire event, towards the end of it, we get a little punchy, we start to have hallucinations. Maybe not really.

But anyway, it’s fun because we do have our Discord channel where we’re all discussing what’s going on and we have the ability to chat with one another, [00:24:00] and we have that camaraderie through that. But it is also a challenging thing to be able to make it through that many hours a week. When I was a teenager, a lot easier. 52 years old, a bit more of a challenge.

Topher: Amen to that.

Cate: Yeah. Dan, will you tell us a little bit about the choice to bring Discord into the event? Just real quick. I know for me personally that had a huge impact on the amount of fun I had as a volunteer having Discord available. And I never would have thought that. I never would have thought there’d be a time in my life I’d use Discord or I’d want to use Discord or any of those things. So can you just talk about that a little bit before we wrap up?

Dan: Sure. I think this is the really exciting part about this, as Michelle was touching on there. We’ve got a global events that is meant to have a focus on the global community that is run by an organizing team across the globe. We’ve got many people across our team that are spread across multiple time zones. And of course, that communication side of it is part of the challenge. So how do we overcome that? How do we make sure that we’re all in the right place doing the right thing at the right time.

Because we’ve got 66 sessions this time around from across a 24-hour event. That’s a lot of moving parts. That’s a lot of things that we need to make sure is happening at the exact right moment. And Discord became just this little gem within the whole thing that I certainly didn’t expect to be quite sort of positive experience from it, if I’m honest.

We used it as a voice-only channel. So our day-to-day basis for the organizing we use Slack as communication. We’ll often jump in Zoom calls, regular team meetings, etc., building up to it. But on the day, we felt that there’s so much going on at such a fast pace that Slack really didn’t offer that ability for us if something needs to be dealt with [00:26:00] quickly there and then.

So, voice was the route that we wanted to go. So we use discord as a voice only. You’ve got the push to talk solution within Discord. Basically, we just left that channel open as a channel between all of the organizers. And then we had a channel for our AV team and various other team members that would enable us just to simply drop in.

For me, I certainly had it open for the full 24 hours of the event, and there was just chatter back and forth all day long. And it was just spectacular. For Me, it created this really special experience which you get, or I’ve experienced when I’ve run large in-person conferences in the past, where the team just built this bond on the day or over the few days that you’re delivering the event.

And you all understand just how exhausted you are going through that process of delivering an event. Because it is tiring. We need to face facts. When you’re doing in-person, you’ve got a lot of physical stuff around it. But when you’re doing it virtually, there’s a huge cognitive load. I mean, the amount of stuff that you’ve just got to be thinking about and keeping on top of.

It was this strange experience of literally like we were running around the halls trying to track speakers down and find out where people were, even though we were doing this entire thing virtually. And I think that combination of Discord for voice and Slack for text actually helped to create that kind of experience of the hallways. And literally we’re on the hallway chat. It was literally having this hallway chats because you would just run into somebody on Discord and you’d have that conversation. And it was fantastic.

Cate: Yeah, I didn’t… Oh, go ahead.

Dan: I think it has created some really special moments for me, which I’m so happy that we use the tools.

Cate: And I didn’t even think of it until you just mentioned it. But you’re absolutely right. I mean, it was so great to get to have conversations with people that I had been working with for a long time or people that I had [00:28:00] not really met exactly, but we were just all kind of hanging out together. And it really was that hallway feel of being at an event. It was pretty spectacular.

Michelle: You can type lol in Slack, or you can actually laugh with one another on Discord. And that’s the difference, right?

Cate: It is.

Michelle: It’s a much better bonding experience when you can have that opportunity. It’s a little bit like we’re all in the same place on walkie-talkies and having that ability to kind of just chat with each other.

Dan: But then that was also what we were trying to replicate again in the platform with the table functionality. So you haven’t got 60, 70, 80 people all stuck on a single video conference. You’ve actually got the ability, because we know who’s within the events, we’ve got the ability to open up the platform for people to freely move about.

And it was about trying to replicate that kind of hallway track the… I certainly absolutely love when I go to an in-person event. I spent far more time in the hallway track than I do in the sessions. And that was what I really wanted to replicate in some way, the best way we possibly could in a virtual environment. And from the feedback we’ve had, we’ve had some phenomenal responses in relation to the format of the event.

Cate: Yeah. One of my favorite things was at the very end, all these organizers went and sat down at a table together, you know, virtually but still at the table and just kind of collapsed in a heap and sat there for like an hour just kind of decompressing. And it was a great way to end the event, to be able to sit down with your friends and just sigh and not really talk about anything while you’re still talking about everything.

Michelle: And it was an open table though. So other people were still part of it, and laughing [00:30:00] and enjoying that aspect of it as well. It was like, wow, I get to talk to the people who’ve been putting this whole thing on. So that made it I think even more special that some people decided to stay and hang out with us too.

Cate: I felt so bad for the poor sponsor guy who was there, who just kind of collapsed on the table and forgot to let go.

Michelle: Poor guy.

Topher: That’s the end of an event like WordFest, the volunteers often need to reach out to a mental health organization.

Dan: This is something I wanted to just touch on. We’re talking about, obviously, we do put in a lot of very long hours over the delivery of the event. But this is something we’re making a conscious choice as individuals to do that here. This isn’t something every person that comes on as a volunteer across this, we discourage people to actually be active across the entire event.

We actually did last time and we will be doing it again. This time we placed breaks through the sessions because we do want to encourage people because obviously, it’s not healthy for us to be spending any sort of length of time in front of our monitors at our desks. So it is about making sure that we’re balancing our well-being with obviously the enjoyment of the events.

I mean, I certainly over the course of that 24 hour period while we were delivering the event last time, the amount of times I went off within my office, but still keeping in contact with what was going on. It’s fantastic

Michelle: I actually took a three-hour nap in the middle of it.

Cate: I slept and Topher took over my communication duties.

Topher: That worked pretty well actually for the two of us. We tag-teamed sleeping and working.

Dan: We had this wonderful, wonderful situation right at the start of the event where I won’t mention names, but one of our lead organizers, a very key individual in the whole process overslept right at the start.

Michelle: He’s MIA as we started to get up and running.

Dan: But it all adds to that experience of events, I think. [00:32:00]

Topher: We’re getting close to wrapping up here. So before we go, I’d like to hear about the details of the upcoming WordFest? When? Where? All that.

Dan: Sure. The next WordFest is going to take place on the 23rd of July starting at midnight UTC. As we know that can be challenging. So take a look at Wordfest.live. Www.wordfest.live. On there, you will find on the homepage, a list of exactly when we start. So we actually start off in Australia. The purpose of this event is a global celebration of WordPress. So we start off in Australia, we move on to Asia, Africa, Europe, South America and finish up in North America.

And if you look at the homepage of the site, you’ll see that there is a list of when we start. We’ve tried to be as helpful as possible. So we’ve listed both UTC time. So we start at UTC midnight. We’ve listed the local time for that continent or kind of as local as we can for that continent. The site should also detect where you’re coming in from. So your time zone will also be displayed as well, all going well.

So please forgive us. Time zones are complicated and difficult trying to deal with a global events such as this, which is why we stuck with UTC, which is really, really conveniently actually coordinated universal time. Even the acronym is the wrong way around. So head over to Wordfest.live 23rd of July. We would love to see you join us.

We do have an open call for volunteers available at the moment at the point of recording. So if you are interested in being part of this, then do head over to www.wordfest.live/call-for-volunteers. And you can be part of this. We had 64 people across the last event have [00:34:00] volunteer to help deliver it. So it does take a village, it does take a small village to deliver something like this. So if you’re interested, we’ve got a wide variety of skills that we’re looking for and we’d love to hear from you.

Topher: That’s really great.

Cate: Yeah, thanks so much.

Topher: Yeah, yeah, we really appreciate it. It’s been fun hearing about it.

Michelle: The schedule is live too. So if you’re interested in seeing who’s talking and what it looks like, go look at the schedule. Some really great topics, some really great talks out there. Again, there’s a few places that look blank because we have some fun things up our sleeves too. So pay attention. Follow us on Twitter @aBigOrangeHeart Big. Find us Wordfest.live. We’re also on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

Cate: And tickets are free.

Dan: There’s donations.

Cate: Yup, there’s a $10 donation, optional, if you want. That goes towards Big Orange Heart and all the work they do for remote workers. But the registration is open and tickets are free. And we would love to have you at the event because there’s really something fun for everyone.

Michelle: And there’s still spots for sponsors. I have to say that.

Cate: Yes.

Dan: Yeah, we do have an optional micro sponsorship which closely reflects the actual cost of a ticket, what it would cost us if we were to be delivering this as a paid for event. So if you’re interested, everything can be found on Wordfest.live.

Cate: Thanks.

Dan: Cate, Topher, I just want to say thank you. We really appreciate this opportunity to come and have a chat with you. Hallway Chat is great that it’s back. It’s great that it’s got this new home. We’re really honored to come and join you for the first one.

Topher: Thank you very much.

Cate: Well, thanks. Yeah, we couldn’t think of two better people to start off talking with, both for all the things you do, for your charming personalities, for the comfortableness of talking to somebody that I actually know really well. We’re really grateful to have you on our first Hallway Chats. I can’t wait to talk to you again soon.

Michelle: Sounds good. I wish you well in all your future episodes.

Cate: Thanks. [00:36:00]

Topher: Thanks. This has been an episode of Hallway Chats, part of the HeroPress network. Your hosts were Cate and Topher. We’d like to thank Sophia DeRosia for the music and Liquid Web for hosting our website. If you liked the episode, please subscribe and mention us on social media.