In a recent blog post, I mentioned that we’ve started thinking about some new and exciting ways to reach out to cPanel partners and customers in 2016 and beyond. Now that cPanel Conference 2015 is behind us and we’ve announced Portland, Oregon as the location for next year’s event, it seems like the perfect time to get this conversation started.
We’ve repeatedly heard from our partners and customers, “You should do cPanel Conference in Europe…or somewhere in Asia…or even the East Coast.” Sometimes we’ve heard, “You should do your event in the spring.”
We also realize that not everyone can always make it to cPanel Conference, and this is due to many possible reasons, including date, location, cost, etc.
So, beginning at an exhibit table in Singapore, we began to ask ourselves the following question: “What if we took a ‘mini’ cPanel Conference on the road?”
How mini are there?
See what I did with that headline?
At this point, we’re simply in the exploratory phase of this project, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t talked about what a mini cPanel Conference might look like. While there’s no way we can replicate our big event in multiple locations, we do know that we want to take some of the things people love about our annual conference and make them available to more people.
cPanel certifications
We recently rolled out a new and improved cPanel University site, which greatly improves the experience of registering and testing for our sales and technical certifications. In Denver, we gave attendees a sneak peek of our online courses, slated to debut in early 2016. These courses will help educate people on cPanel & WHM and prepare them for the exam.
This training and certification is something you’re most likely to see happen on-site at our roadshows. This is always popular at cPanel Conference, and we’re confident it will help more people get certified than ever before.
Product demos
Aside from showcasing what the product can already do, we’ll use these events as an opportunity to show you what we have planned for the future, demo specific features, and solicit feedback on things we have planned for upcoming releases.
This real-time feedback and conversation with developers and product managers will help give us more insight as to what we’re doing right as well as what we can do better.
Sales & Marketing support
We spend a lot of time at our conferences talking about how to better market and sell cPanel hosting. These events will give you the opportunity to sit down in-person with our Marketing and Account Management teams to see how we gather feedback, make decisions, and help brainstorm ideas and solutions for your business.
With the help of our UX experts, we could also help you brainstorm ways to leverage cPanel on your site and online shopping cart.
World-famous networking
If cPanel Conference is known for anything, it’s most definitely the networking. So, if we bring this shindig on the road, then you can expect the same excellent networking opportunities you’ve enjoyed in the past. There is no such thing as cPanel Conference without the top-shelf networking. The quality of our networking is what separates cPanel Conference from all the others.
All the questions!
As exciting as this is for us, and hopefully you, we have a lot of questions to answer internally, but more importantly externally, to decide if this is a viable option.
Some of those important questions are:
- Is this something that you would benefit from?
- How far would you travel for an event like this?
- If you attend, what would you like to get out of it?
These are just a few of the many questions that we’re exploring right now, and nothing will help us more than your feedback.
Leave your thoughts in the comments below, tell me on Twitter, or just show up to the first mini cPanel Conference.
