As it were…

You may recall that in January of 2017 I started a grand experiment with Tanner Moushey. As experiments go, it was a great success, which is to say we learned a lot. As businesses go, it lasted until Feb of 2018. It was a great experience, and I learned a lot, and it paid the bills for a year, but as any entrepreneur will tell you, it’s a stressful life.

So after February I started looking for a Real Job. I applied to a number of places that didn’t even respond (one of which had approached me first!). I did two trials at Automattic and washed out of both of them. That was a great learning experience as well.

Spring faded into summer, and I was doing contract work to keep bread on the table, but that was getting old.

Then one night at 10pm a couple weeks ago my friend Luke sent me a Slack note, saying he knew of a large company looking for a WordPress evangelist, would I be interested? If you know anything about me then you know I was immediately interested.

He told me a little about it on the spot, but he was in a meeting with them in Sydney at the time (hence 10pm my time). I was a little wary at first. This sounded REALLY good, and I’d already been disappointed by other things this summer.

The next morning I sent an email to The Guy at The Company and we arranged to talk when he got back to Austin.  He basically went from plane ride from Sydney to a meeting with me to jury duty, all in one day. Iron man.

We talked for about 30 min and they said they were sending me an offer as quickly as possible.  Five days later I had an offer and accepted it!

So now I’m the WordPress Developer Evangelist for BigCommerce.  “But wait!” you say. “They don’t do WordPress do they?”.  For the unaware, BigCommerce is a hosted ecommerce solution. You sign up, pay the fee, and *poof* you have a store. Well, recently they decided to get into WordPress, big time. You can read about it here and here.

I’m crazy excited of course. I’ve been looking for a WordPress evangelist job for years, but beyond that I’m also really excited about the product. I know who built it, and I know who’s code reviewing it. I’ve been assured by people I trust that they’re putting the appropriate time and money into this project, and it should be really really solid. The number of good WordPress ecommerce plugins is really low, and some serious competition will only be a good thing I think.

So maybe I’ll be seeing you at a WordCamp soon! Feel free to ask me all the questions.