A few days ago Simon and I hosted our first ever in-person event: The Vibes. How did it go? Let me put it this way, if I just said "it was awesome!" that would be a massive understatement.
When we started to plan for this back in November we just thought it would be cool to hang out with a few people after Laracon, to continue the networking, app generation ideas etc. that one usually walks away with after 2 days of talks, friends, and like-minded developers. The concept was just to keep "the vibes" of Laracon going a bit longer and we thought we could use some of the momentum of NativePHP to host and invite a few more people.
We forked over quite a bit of cash to reserve a venue, order food and started to plan for ~100 people to attend. Again, we have never done anything like this before and what seemed a bit overwhelming initially was met with an amazing venue and hosts that held our hand and made each decision bespoke, light and simple. Everything from the rooms to choose from, the audio/video setup, the catering, the table/chair placement and scheduling - we were very happy with Paige and Lyndsey and Amira at Loft on Two, we highly recommend them.
We put early bird tickets up for sale earlier this year, knowing that we would lose money on the whole adventure, but as long as we sold most tickets we didn't mind investing into the community that has been rallying behind us for the last 18 months on the mobile side and over 3 years on desktop.
We sold 20 tickets. In the first 3 months or so - we were "stuck", maybe a bit of panic even set in, actually, as we were nearing the deadline. Almost every week there would be maybe 1-2 sales. All we could do is hope for the best. We asked about refunds or just swapping to a smaller room, it would have been a waste - the policy was only a 50% refund and the smaller room was about the same price, we would have simply lost thousands of dollars. So we decided to double down.
Then a "lucky break", one of our partners DirectMeds came through and decided to purchase 15 tickets for almost their entire team to join us! (They're growing fast and are on bit of a hiring spree right, for Laravel developers).
That pushed us up closer to about 50 tickets. Jetbrains/PHPStorm hopped in and contributed as a sponsor. Geocodio did the same AND bought 3 tickets. Ticket sales kept coming in, a bit more steadily. Then The PHP Foundation sponsored and Elizabeth Barron bought a ticket. More and more support came in from more companies, Web Mavens, Nexcalia, Guillermo at Nopticon, and Len and Ed at Artisan Build contributed. We had wanted to do t-shirts from the beginning but discarded that idea quickly due to the extra cost - until Jump24 jumped in with a huge contribution as our official t-shirt sponsor!
Starting this process, we went out on a limb and invested nearly $15,000 into the event. If no one showed up, Simon and I would be eating sandwiches for months 🤣. As of the day before The Vibes we had recovered all but about $1,000!
Then, the most amazing thing happened: on the day of the event, more than 10 tickets were purchased at the door! People purchased our Make. Ship. Happen. hats and Jack McDade and the Statamic team started contributing towards the whole project via OpenCollective - while we were on stage!
Not only did we just about break even on our first event, we had over 100 people show up as we released NativePHP v4.0 "SuperNative".
And on top of that, we had quite a few folks interested in the idea of speaking and showing off what they're doing with NativePHP.
John Koster demonstrated the desktop app he's been working on for months, a project we've kept pretty secret, called Tesseract. It serves as your all-in-one build/debug tool for NativePHP mobile apps (more on that in the future). This was his first ever time getting in front of an audience and speaking!
Zac Hiler demoed 2 plugins he's been working on for a while, Charts and HelthKit/HealthConnect, and announced he was donating the plugins to NativePHP as first party plugins and will continue to support them!
Andy Swick let the whole event vote live on a series of questions that was both eye opening and hilarious.
Mary Perry did a DEEP DIVE on the architecture of NativePHP and even gave the framework the Mary Perry Approval Award to the whole project.
Povilas Korop spoke on how important it is for all of the community to not only build and ship but also the importance of being VOCAL in the socials about what we are doing here and correctly identified that is one of the biggest strengths of the PHP community - especially while Simon and I are working - running at solving the problems and creating something truly unique for the framework, our time is simply limited.
And closing us out we had Roman Pronskiy, showing off PHPStorm Light and some of the features JetBrains have been working on to make your favorite IDE even better.
To finish off the morning, Simon and I decided to let the youth in the room, my son Carson and E. Hiler, push the publish button on v4. It was our way to signal that this wasn't just for today, and not just a tribute to the previous 31 years that PHP has been around, but to show our heart and desire to fuel the next 31+ years of PHP strength.
Zac had kindly offered to record the whole event and brought some of his incredible kit to try to capture what we could of this milestone. Hopefully we'll have some videos from the day that we can share with everyone soon.
I am a bit in shock reflecting on everything that went down for the first Vibes event. We wake up everyday eager to work on making NativePHP great, not just good or acceptable, but GREAT. Seeing the community in-person physically rally around us, cheer us on and support what we are doing is heartwarming and inspirational. I cannot wait to get back to my spot on my couch and build out the next big thing...
By the way - we already know what it is, and yes, you will again be shocked by what we are going to do with this technology.
Make. Ship. Happen.
— Shane
