We are back with part two of our interview with Marisa Hambleton. In part one, we discussed entrepreneurship, its pros and cons, and how the pandemic created new challenges for her.

In part two, we get into the beginning days of Cactusforce and how it organically grew from a group of developers at Happy Hour to a conference with hundreds of participants in just a few short years. She also discusses how their conference had to pivot from in-person to virtual in 2021 and how they were able to allow participants to interact with the speakers and be involved.

If you missed part one, go back to episode 178 and start there. Otherwise, enjoy part two!

Show Highlights:

  • How Happy Hour amongst developers turned into a conference
  • How people may not be dedicated to one technology
  • The content Marisa curated at Cactusforce conferences
  • How to solve dense problems and get advanced developers on stage
  • How Cactusforce has grown since 2020 and managed virtual conferences in 2021

Links:

Episode Transcript

Marisa Hambleton:
That started pretty immediately when I discovered Salesforce. It was 2009 when I, again, first discovered Salesforce. I started wondering, “How did I not know about this?”

Josh Birk:
That is, once again, Marisa Hambleton talking about how she got into Salesforce. I’m Josh Birk, your host of the Salesforce Developer Podcast. Here on the podcast, you’ll hear stories and insights from developers for developers. Today, we continue with the second half of the full version of Marisa’s previous interview. We’re going to get into how Cactusforce got launched, among other things. We’re going to pick up where we left off there about how she got into Salesforce.

Marisa Hambleton:
Are there other people that do this Salesforce thing? The woman, Jacqueline… Good friend of mine now. She brought me into this. She says, “Hey, by the way, I saw that there’s this group that they meet at the library up in Scottsdale. You should go check it out.” That was that summer. Immediately, I discovered it in the beginning of the year. I was like, “Okay, I’ve got to go check it out.” Sure enough, there was about… I think maybe there was 10 or 15 people in the library auditorium, sparsely spread out. The auditoriums for… I don’t know, 120 people. There’s 15 of them, one person per row. I felt like, “Oh, these are my people. My new people.”

Josh Birk:
Nice.

Marisa Hambleton:
Of course, I went and looked immediately for the other woman in the room and made friends with her. Then, just I was excited. They met quarterly. I had that on my calendar. Like, “Okay, every quarter I’ve got to be there-

Josh Birk:
Nice.

Marisa Hambleton:
“…and just meet more of these people.” It went along like that for a few years. Around the same time, I discovered that there was also a nonprofit group who, coincidentally, were the first ones that had a Cactusforce event.

Josh Birk:
Really?

Marisa Hambleton:
Yes. They were the ones that coined the term Cactusforce.

Josh Birk:
I did not know that.

Marisa Hambleton:
They wanted to do a joint meeting of the nonprofit group and the for-profit group. It was in 2012. I had to look it up because I was like, “I knew it was a while back, but I couldn’t remember the exact year.” It was at a little independent film bar in downtown Phoenix. They’re like, “Oh, yeah. Everybody, get together and have cocktails and help each other out and talk about different apps that they’re using.” They called it Cactusforce. Ever since then, I was like, “Oh, we got to do more of this.” In the meantime, we all tried to stay in touch. The Phoenix user group, the Phoenix nonprofit group… Again, that was 2009 to 2012. Then, around 2013, the leader of the group was getting ready to… “Okay, I’ve been doing this for a really long time.” I think he’s… 2006 or something that they’d have that they’d had a group. I was like, “Oh, I’ll do it. Me, me, me. Pick me. Pick me.”

Josh Birk:
Why? Why did you want to jump in that role?

Marisa Hambleton:
Oh, gosh. I love parties. I love having fun. I think it just seemed like a party. We’d get together and talk about Salesforce. Usually, there was a partner that would give a presentation. Then, somewhere in between there, there was one of the guys, Mike Norton. He was my co-leader for a little while. He says, “Why don’t we have a happy hour?” I’m like, “That’s a good question. We should have a happy hour.”
After the meeting, I was like, “Okay, everybody follow me. Let’s go find a pub.” It evolved that way. There’s a little while where I was bringing snacks and waters and little treats and stuff because I was like… I don’t know. There’s people. I feel like there should be food and something. I don’t know. I felt like that was the thing to do. Everybody seemed to enjoy it. People wanted to chat and get together and talk. But we were always getting kicked out of the library because they had closing hours. Right when everybody was talking and getting to know each other, the librarian would come and… “Okay, it’s time to get out. Okay, go.” Then, we’d be outside the door talking. They’d be like, “You can’t loiter here.” We’re like, “Okay, great.” Of course, then we were like, “Okay, we’ll leave the meeting and then go have a happy hour.”
That’s how it happened. I mean, it just slowly, over time… It was a very diverse group of people because it was one group, other than the nonprofit users. But we had developers and just salespeople and regular users and admins. You name it. They were in there. It was everybody.
I didn’t realize that at the time, but today, to this day, there are… I think if you can go look at the Cactus Foresight, I list all the groups that we have in Arizona. There is a user group or admin group in Tucson, Prescott, Phoenix. We have a developer group. We have a nonprofit group. We have a women-in-tech group. We have a marketing group. I think Phoenix has a marketing group. I think Tucson has a marketing group. It’s crazy. It’s really exploded because there’s so many people now. It’s just a huge, really vibrant community. I feel like, hey, it all started with this humble little group of 15 people in Phoenix.

Josh Birk:
Who really just wanted a happy hour.

Marisa Hambleton:
Yeah. We just all wanted to hang out and have a party and chat about Salesforce here and there.

Josh Birk:
Okay. I think I’m hearing possibly that where this is going then… Because some of the other regional groups… They realize they have a lot of distinct user groups around the area. Then they’re like, “Why don’t we band forces once a year and get everybody in the same conference building, basically.” How did it evolve from happy hour proliferation of developer groups to we want to do an actual conference?

Marisa Hambleton:
It was quite the evolution. I like to tell people that Cactusforce was a community long before it was a conference-

Josh Birk:
Nice.

Marisa Hambleton:
…’cause it was. It’s all the local people here in Arizona. I’ve been keeping an eye on the community conferences ever since Midwest Dreamin with Eric Dreshfield​​ and when Angela Mahoney started Forcelandia. I think Alex Sutherland started Phillyforce. The name really stuck with me. I felt like these are really awesome. It’s like this community. Well, there’s Dreamforce, but then there’s that local flavor that you get in these local community conferences. I really loved that.
I felt like Phoenix… It’s a really large metropolitan. But there’s nothing else nearby. You’ve got LA to the west. Think the next major, major, major city, if you go west, is Austin. That’s a two-day drive, or I think Salt Lake City just north of us or Denver. I felt like just for the local, that regional flavor, we didn’t really have anything. We could get all the groups together, which we had. I don’t want to say that I did test runs, but they were test runs where we did multi-group meetings. We’d get about 100 people.
It’s interesting because people are like, “Well…” In Minneapolis, their regular user group will draw 250 people. I feel like that’s the regional part of it, is that-

Josh Birk:
Gotcha.

Marisa Hambleton:
…people will come together for different reasons in different, I guess, quantities, if you will. The thing that I think for Phoenix and in Arizona is that Arizona has a very vibrant tech community. Salesforce is not the only technology that people are interested in or that are involved in. I feel like my own story can attest to that. 10 years at IBM… I’d never heard of Salesforce.
There’s a whole bunch of other technology folks: .NET developers, Java developers, full stack web developers, any, again, engineering software development that you can think of that are in their own other communities. I feel like that’s where, with a Salesforce community, people are not just dedicated to one technology. Again, that’s what I’ve seen just in the local population, is that people are working on multiple platforms. If you’re working in a company, especially because we have very large companies, you’re going to be working with all these different tools and frameworks.
The draw to come to a specific Salesforce event isn’t as big as you would think because it’s not a direct correlation between the number of people that live in the area and the attendance.

Josh Birk:
Gotcha.

Marisa Hambleton:
That was one of the ideas that I had of bringing Cactusforce here as a technology event is to try to attract not only our local people that we usually attract but also to attract your Java developer or .NET developer and to make it more of a regular tech event because there are other large tech technology events here in Phoenix. I want Cactusforce to be one of those.

Josh Birk:
Interesting.

Marisa Hambleton:
Yeah.

Josh Birk:
Tell me a little bit about the content that you were then going to be trying to curate because it sounds like the different regional conferences all have their own flare. Forcelandia tries to be, I feel like, more technical and definitely more to the technical architecture. It sounds like you’re not only going in that vein but also trying to be… What would content be that you would want to bring in the Java developer, the C-Sharp?

Marisa Hambleton:
Yes. Again, Forcelandia was one of our inspiration conferences, is the content for Cactusforce would target the experienced developer-

Josh Birk:
Gotcha.

Marisa Hambleton:
…and the experienced architect. Again, I’m going to say “technical” is a loaded term because it’s people that are working in and around the Salesforce platform. They might be working on integrations. They might be, again, working with Java at the enterprise level.

Josh Birk:
Gotcha.

Marisa Hambleton:
If they’re a Salesforce developer, they’re not only a Salesforce developer. I’m going to use my husband as an example because I feel like he really does epitomize the average Salesforce developer in Arizona because he is a Salesforce developer, but he works… Sometimes he’ll do .NET. Sometimes he’ll do Java. It’s all within the purview of his responsibilities at his job. I wanted Cactusforce to have that content. That’s where, again, just the team, the Cactus crew… And I say me because it was my brainchild, but by no means could I have ever done this alone. I mean, it’s just really such a big group effort.
My co-organizer, Steve Simpson, is a CTA. I’ve got Chuck Liddell, that is one of the primary content curators on the developer track. Then, I’ll pull in a couple of different people for the configuration because, again, a developer also works with its clicks before code. I wanted that really a holistic set of content that would speak across a solution, the design and the development clicks and code.
We’ve had a couple of different people. We had Deepa Patel and Michael Coleman’s the first year. Then, this year, we had one of our local women in tech leaders, Gloria Gutierrez, that helped with the configurator track curation. But again, across all of those is… And this is more true for the first couple of years than it was for this year. That content, again, is… It’s not broad enough, but it’s a big enough presentation about the platform that there could be something… Again, it goes into really advanced content that a Java or .NET developer can say, “Hey, yeah. If it’s looking at integrating systems, I can learn something here.”

Josh Birk:
I definitely want to give a tip of the hat to Chuck Liddell, especially acknowledging the work that he’s done with the extracurricular, which brought deep technical architecture dialogue to Dreamforce, TDX, and also want to say a shout-out to Chuck because having gone through blood, sweat, and tears with him to help get that stuff on stage… I swear one of those things might be literal. But you have to go to those advanced developers. I like to joke I’m not really an enterprise developer anymore. I just play one on TV. If you’re going to get those complicated… How do you solve these really nuanced problems? You have to get the advanced developers on stage in order to get that done.

Marisa Hambleton:
Yes, yes, yes. Chuck was a big inspiration for what I was going for because… And I don’t have any specific examples of Cactusforce talks because the idea was to try to get a lot of different talks. What my goal was is if I had a couple of people tell me, “This is way over my head. This is too complicated,” then I feel like the goal was accomplished because it’s these really hard problems.
Again, just I’m focused more on delivery. But I feel like one of the things that I’ve done as a community leader is try to be in touch with the constituency here to know and understand what challenges do the local developers face in these companies. My husband works for a state farm. My former co-leader, Mike Norton… He worked at Amex. We have… Let’s see. I’m trying to think of some big companies here in town, Discount Tire, Honeywell, just to name a few. I would listen to the problems that some of these developer teams were having. I thought, “Well, how do you get on the other side of it?” because you have your internal team of developers or engineers or architects. You might be bringing in some consultants. People are discussing really what integration middleware are we going to use. Are we going to go Boomy or MuleSoft?

Josh Birk:
Right, which, of course, go MuleSoft.

Marisa Hambleton:
Yes. Go MuleSoft.

Josh Birk:
Team Mule. I think I’m paid to say that these days.

Marisa Hambleton:
Yes.

Josh Birk:
Okay. I want to talk about the recent iterations. You just did the virtual version of Cactusforce. We’ll get into that. But let’s compare it. Just briefly, what was the size and the shape of Cactusforce 2019?

Marisa Hambleton:
The size.

Josh Birk:
Or 2020, I guess it would’ve been.

Marisa Hambleton:
Yes, 2020. Yes.

Josh Birk:
Because you’re early in the year.

Marisa Hambleton:
Yes, yes. And it does. It feels funny to say, “Oh, it was last year. But, oh, wait, no, it was this year.” No, it was last year. The size was small. Again, I feel like numbers matter because we have, again… And I’ll keep repeating it: that we have a very specific audience.

Josh Birk:
Goal. Yeah, yeah.

Marisa Hambleton:
…of advanced developers and architects, people that are more experienced in working in and around the Salesforce platform. These are the people that are solving the really hard problems. Again, that’s that gap because there’s a lot of content around… And Trailhead’s awesome for getting started and making that leap into the platform. But then, once you’re in the middle of the hairy, tricky problems, then you need something beyond that. That’s where I feel like Cactusforce comes in.

Josh Birk:
Gotcha.

Marisa Hambleton:
The first year, we targeted 100 people. According to the community conference guidelines, you need at least 200 people in order to be considered an official conference.

Josh Birk:
Got it.

Marisa Hambleton:
Because I’m a delivery person… And I say, “Okay, I can promise you that I will get a hundred people here. I can’t go beyond that.” They’re like, “Okay. Well, we can’t make you an official conference.” I’m like, “I’m cool with that. Can I use my developer group budget to help fund this initiative?” Then, I went and got sponsors. We actually had almost 200 people. I think it was 170, was our final count.

Josh Birk:
Got it.

Marisa Hambleton:
Our target was 100. I feel like we blew it out of the ballpark there.

Josh Birk:
That’s awesome. Awesome.

Marisa Hambleton:
Set the expectations low. Deliver high.

Josh Birk:
Yeah. Yeah. One of my favorite quotes from being a consultant is reality always wins.

Marisa Hambleton:
Yes.

Josh Birk:
You can’t push the numbers that aren’t there.

Marisa Hambleton:
Yes. Yes. The second year we went, we said, “Okay, we can get more than 200. Let’s target 250.” Totally hit that. I’d have to go back and double-check the numbers. I don’t have them off the top of my head. But I believe we had almost 300 people. We were trying to stuff people in a room that had a capacity of 275. Steve was like, “Ooh, I want to tweet it.” I’m like, “No-”

Josh Birk:
No.

Marisa Hambleton:
“…because I don’t want the fire marshal to come.”

Josh Birk:
The fire marshals out there.

Marisa Hambleton:
Yes. Yes.

Josh Birk:
I love how having worked in conferences and event planning, all this stuff, and respect to them and the work that they do because they keep us safe, but the fire marshals are always the boogieman.

Marisa Hambleton:
Yes.

Josh Birk:
They’re the ones who open the door. People think Dreamforce has this tradition of opening early. No, the fire marshals call us. They’re like, “You need to open doors now because there’s too many people outside.” They have power. They have real power.

Marisa Hambleton:
Yes. Yes, they do. They do.

Josh Birk:
Nice. Okay. Then, walk me through 2021. When did you know that you were going to have to… Actually, let me frame the question like this. When did you know that you were not going to have a live event/a real-person event?

Marisa Hambleton:
Probably by the end of February. That was my personal feeling.

Josh Birk:
Gut.

Marisa Hambleton:
My personal gut. My kids were getting ready to go on spring break. They go on spring break early out here in Arizona, the first week of March. I felt, at that point, I was still reeling from Cactusforce. The energy. I have my Cactusforce shirt on. We get our organizers a different color shirts so that we stand out a little bit.
My son and my grandson were visiting. We were talking about it. He’s going through his Doctor of Physical Therapy program at UNLV. We were talking about COVID. He says, “Yeah, mama. He says, “This thing’s really bad.” He says, “I think it’s going to get really, really, really bad. I’ve been reading about it.” I said, “Yeah, I think you’re right.” I was thinking about Cactusforce. I said, “Yeah.” I said, “I think you’re right. I said, “I just have this really bad feeling that next year’s not going to be the same.” By May, Steve and I, for sure… We’re like, “There’s no way we’re going to do…” I had already been talking to the event planner that we use. She says, “Well, we can try a hybrid.” Then, by May, the three of us were like-

Josh Birk:
Not even a hybrid.

Marisa Hambleton:
“…No.” No. We’re talking January. We’re still months away.

Josh Birk:
Then, the follow-up, when did you decide… Was it always determined you were going to just go IRL to virtual? Or was there an inflection point where you were like, “Maybe we just don’t do ’21. Maybe we just skip a year. We’ll see you all the following year”?

Marisa Hambleton:
Again, I felt like I got to keep my January. I’m on a cadence. I got to keep it. Then, I told my husband, I said, “I don’t know. You think Steve will go for it?” He’s like, “I don’t know.” Again, I had this internal dialogue. Then, I was bouncing ideas to my husband. Then, me and Steve synced up. We’re like, “So what do you think?” I’m like, “I don’t know. Let me think.” He’s like, “I’ll think too.” Then I said, “Well, let’s circle back in a couple of weeks, and then we’ll independently decide what we’ve come to.” We both were like, “We got to keep January. We just got started.” I mean, Cactusforce… I feel like we were really just in this momentum. We felt like it’s crazy. But what the heck? Let’s just do it. I said, “We’ll figure something out. We’re smart people.” We told our event planner. We said, “Look, how can we make this happen?” Again, Eric Dreshfield recommended hire a pro.

Josh Birk:
Nice.

Marisa Hambleton:
She found us our event platform, Hopin, and helped us run through some test runs and just negotiate that whole arena, our budget, just everything. Everything just we had to go through. It was incredibly time-consuming. It really took so much more effort than… I mean, we knew it would be a lot of effort. Our expectations were exceeded. But also, as far as the level of effort on every person’s part, everybody-

Josh Birk:
Oh, wow.

Marisa Hambleton:
…worked incredibly hard to pull it off.

Josh Birk:
Nice. Well, and just as a simple question, how did it go?

Marisa Hambleton:
It exceeded all of our expectations. It really did.

Josh Birk:
I feel like this is a trend with you. I’m just kidding.

Marisa Hambleton:
Yeah. Gosh. I feel like I’m still coming off the Cactusforce cloud. There were a lot of things that went wrong by the way. We could pull a really long gag reel for all the little awkward moments of people being on camera. Are my slides showing?

Josh Birk:
Oh, gosh.

Marisa Hambleton:
Can you hear me?

Josh Birk:
Of course.

Marisa Hambleton:
Our moderators and being on camera when they should have been off. But I feel like it’s also real. The presenters showed up. We were able to have more presenters. Actually, again, there was a lot we couldn’t do. There’s no way you can replace in-person experience with virtual. We didn’t even try to do that. We tried to focus on great content. The fact that we’re virtual… Let’s bring as much as we can, which we knew it would be a lot of effort. But we felt like it’ll give people the option to pick and choose which sessions they want to be in, live, to interact live with the speaker-

Josh Birk:
Nice.

Marisa Hambleton:
…and have the opportunity to be on camera and ask their questions live, which, again, Cactusforce… It’s that access to the experts and being able to ask those hard questions. We wanted to give people the opportunity to do that in a virtual space and, while we’re at it, invite everybody. It’s a party for whoever wants to come. We had a premium paid ticket where you get a T-shirt.

Josh Birk:
Of course.

Marisa Hambleton:
And then free.

Josh Birk:
Nice.

Marisa Hambleton:
That’s our second. Our number one is great content. Number two is great.

Josh Birk:
That’s awesome. That’s excellent. What is the post-event experience shaping up to be? Two or three weeks ago, at this point, if somebody’s hearing this, they’re finding out about Cactusforce for the first time, can they go back and see the old sessions and the videos and stuff like that?

Marisa Hambleton:
Yes, they can.

Josh Birk:
Nice.

Marisa Hambleton:
All of our video content is posted. We’re still uploading our speaker resources. There’s some of the speakers that wanted to provide their slide deck along with the video content. As speakers send that in, we go ahead and post that up. Our T-shirts are for sale. They’re incredibly comfortable. It’s a next-level, 60/40 poly-cotton blend shirt, super soft.

Josh Birk:
Nice.

Marisa Hambleton:
The design is actually pandemic-friendly because it’s a black-on-black design so that it’s subtle. You can just support Cactusforce and be comfortable at the same time.

Josh Birk:
Nice. We’ll definitely get links to all of that into the show notes. One final question on Cactusforce itself, because I’m asking almost every community/conference organizer who’s been going through this, what are your plans for 2022 in regards… Let’s say, vaccines out for post-pandemic. You have the opportunity to do a live event again. What’s your take on continuing doing virtual events?

Marisa Hambleton:
We will do our very best to bring Cactusforce to a broader audience.

Josh Birk:
Gotcha.

Marisa Hambleton:
We’re very committed to staying in January. There will be a Cactusforce 2022 in January 2022. We’ll do our best to bring that to as many people as possible because, again, it’s a community conference. It’s a community event for the benefit of everybody learning and sharing the lessons. I’m sure there’s going to be a lot more lessons between now and then of what interesting solutions or workarounds or other technology got integrated or architecture design or frameworks. We’d like to be able to share that. We’ll definitely be back. We’re fingers crossed that we get lots of vaccines. We can have some in-person event. But we most certainly do plan to either… If we live stream it or have to organize a whole virtual team, we will be back in January of 2020.

Josh Birk:
That’s our show. Now, before we go, I did ask after Marissa’s favorite non-technical hobby.

Marisa Hambleton:
My favorite non-technical hobby… Writing.

Josh Birk:
Nice, which is very different from a lifelong pursuit of technical enablement and delivery.

Marisa Hambleton:
Yes.

Josh Birk:
Was that something you always wanted to do even in the early days?

Marisa Hambleton:
Not necessarily. Okay. Not necessarily. I used to journal, but I got into writing. I actually have a lot of hobbies. I actually like doing a lot of different things. But during the pandemic, I’ve found that writing has been my… It’s a nice little escape. I can sit and write on the computer or just write long hand.

Josh Birk:
Nice. Nice.

Marisa Hambleton:
It’s been really fun.

Josh Birk:
I want to thank Marissa for the great conversation and information. As always, I want to thank you for listening. Now, if you want to learn more about this show, head on over to developer.salesforce.com/podcast, where you can hear old episodes, see the show notes, and have links to favorite podcasters. Thanks again, everybody. I’ll talk to you next week.

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