Meet Magento CZ 2017 in Prague: the aftermath

For all those that did not have the opportunity to attend this great event last Thursday (on the 27th of April), reading this post will help you get a nice overview of the experience. For those lucky ones that did attend, it will be a nice reminder (and a mental confirmation that you need to also be there next year!).

Of course, huge congratulations and many thanks to the Neklo team that organised this Meet Magento event. Apart from having planned all the details, different members of their Team were available to help with anything.

The data

Approximately 200 people from many different countries gathered in the same place to attend the 2nd Meet Magento Prague. Although I did not expect this, the event was a truly international one, as I met people from US, UK, Poland, India, Dubai and Italy (and I am missing some countries for sure, as I did not have the opportunity to meet all people). As Igor nicely put it:

This is not a CZ-focused Magento event but rather the gathering of the international Meet Magento community in Prague (Igor Bondarenko, Neklo)

Lot of great content in the 21 Talks from experienced speakers on topics ranging from Magento development and tactics to grow an ecommerce store to insights from a scaling startup and the keynote from the Director of Zoo Prague.

Last, but not least, many litres of beer at the afterparty, as you can clearly see :)

The venue

As Thomas Goletz has shared this was the first Meet Magento event presented at a big and luxurious cinema hall! To be honest, for me this was also a 1st as I have never attended another event at a cinema hall. And what an experience this was!

There are 3 reasons why a cinema hall is perfect for such an event, namely acoustics, visuals and comfort. In respect to the visuals, I can just say that these were some great, big, high-quality screens (that you could also play video-games on!, as you can see in the tweets below). Lastly, the seats were absolutely great and comfortable, something that you are not getting in business events.

After the event, there were buses waiting to take us to the afterparty venue where there was a live band playing music, great food and lots of alcohol. What else can you ask for?

The Talks

As I already mentioned there were 21 Talks, organises in 2 tracks (business, technical) from some inspiring, international speakers. The event had a really good flow with a nice cohesion between the Talks, that were organised on the various sessions by theme.

Following I am sharing my view on some of the Talks I listened to. Although I would love to have attended all Talks, I did not. And this was for a great reason, which is to get to know and communicate with amazing people from different places. Every attendee I met had something interesting to share either from one of the Talks or from their own experience.

A story of building a strong worldwide Magento community (Lydia, Meet Magento Association)

The 1st Talk in the event agenda was planned for Thomas Goletz, the founder of Meet Magento Association. Unfortunately Thomas was not able to come, but he had recorded a video that we watched, showing his deep commitment to all the Events. Moreover, Lydia from the MMA Team was there and presented all the great things that are done by the Meet Magento Association and how big and impactful our community is.

The state of Magento (Ben Marks, Magento Commerce)

After Lydia, Ben took the stage to share all the latest updates on Magento. This is not just a speaker, but THE Ben Marks, Magento evangelist and all-star Magento celebrity.

Ben shared the latest data about how big Magento has become, mentioning that Magento Stores sell a combined of $101B each year! Metrics are rising on every dimension be it # of stores, Partners, events or Magento installations (both M1 and M2). Following shared all the updates on M2 and the integration of companies that were acquired and are being integrated on the Magento platform.

Less is more for a startup (Roman Sysel, Taxify)

The first session ended with a Talk on the insights gained from the growth of the scaling startup, Taxify. Roman briefly shared how the company was founded by a 19yr old boy before joining university and all their progress till now, valued at $80M. Especially interesting were their approach into competing with Uber, a bigger and more well-funded competitor. In short, he insisted on trying to become the best at what you do, not only at a local level but aiming high to become the best in the world!

Driving Digital Transformation (Mr.Filip Snášel, Fujitsu Technology Solutions)

Filip is a marketing executive from Fujitsu Technology Solutions. His talk focused on the importance of data in order to successfully operate a growing ecommerce business. He mentioned the proliferation of available data and how we can combine them in order to get actionable insights using Big Data technologies.

Case study: Magento 2 project implementation (Lukáš Bialoň, Artio)

Lucas’s Talk on their experience from M2 implementations was really clear, data-based and full of insights and this is something that I heard from different people. He shared benchmarks on M1 vs M2 implementations in terms of time needed and current pain points on this process, providing all attendees with a nice framework to think about their next implementation.

5 latest email marketing trends for 2017 (Kristina Pototskaya, Triggmine)

Setting up an ecommerce store is really important, but without lots of relevant traffic one cannot grow. Email marketing is one of the top growth drivers and Kristina shared all the latest trends. The most important learning is that using technology, a store can intelligently segment its email list and send relevant, timely and personalised campaigns that can deliver great ROI.

This is the 2nd time I had the pleasure to see Kristina presenting and what I must day is that she really shares insights and adds value while also making us also laugh with her upbeat style.

How to double the revenue of your Magento store with paid traffic (Alex Fedotoff, AF Media)

Effectively promoting a store with digital advertising is key to ecommerce success. Alex shared his framework for doubling the revenue of a store using Facebook Ads either for retargeting or for prospecting. By growing 30% each dimension (frequency, recency, average value) a store can more than x2 its revenue. This was not theory talk, but really actionable tips!

Typical e-commerce issues and how to deal with them (Miles Scudamore, Promodo)

Miles has vast experience from growing Magento stores using digital marketing. In this Talk, he shared how they are auditing a store in terms of SEO and what are the low-hanging fruits that you can take work on in order to grow your store. (I really loved the carefuly designed, great visuals from this presentation. It was as if they were a best practice example from Presentation Zen book).

A Joyful Shopping Experience. It is about creating an e-Commerce websites that are effortless to use (Victor Kravtsov, Amasty)

Another beautifully designed presentation. Victor talked about impactful design by showing us different techniques and best practices on all the areas of an ecommerce website. While he was talking, it was more than clear that he was speaking from vast experience.

Summary

If you reached this far, it is more than sure that you have understood what a great event this was! A truly international event in a great venue with many Talks. I have to say just one thing; see you there next year!

And I would close this post by asking all of us to try to contribute on Magento in order to continue to build such a powerful ecommerce platform. The slide with ways to get involved is from Ben Marks presentation.

Thank you for reading!

P.S. If you enjoyed this article, please help spread it by clicking that ❤ below. And if you want to launch dynamic retargeting campaigns for your Magento store, you should give adaplo a look!