Laura Diaz Join us as we chat with Julio, Laura, and Pedro, passionate members of the Salesforce community who have had their hands full organizing dreamOlé, Spain’s premier Salesforce community conference. They regale us with stories of their beginnings in the Salesforce community, the hurdles they had to overcome in event organization, and the irreplaceable role the community has played in their personal and professional growth.

We also discuss the pivot to virtual event organization amid the pandemic and the resilience of dreamOlé. Wrapping up the conversation, Julio, Laura, and Pedro offer valuable insights on the significance of collaboration, enjoying the process, and the importance of a trustworthy team.

Show Highlights:

  • The challenges faced while organizing the conference and the support and learning they received from the Salesforce community.
  • The significance of dreamOlé in unifying the Salesforce community and fostering connections among its members.
  • Pedro’s journey from being an attendee at the inaugural dreamOlé to becoming a volunteer.
  • The essence of collaboration, the joy of the process, and the importance of a strong team in organizing such events.

Links:

Episode Transcripts

Julio Fernandez:
I’ve been involved with the community for quite a long time. I started attending the Bristol Developer Group back when I lived in the UK, and then when I moved back to Spain, I started running the developer group in Seville. From there, we got in touch with all of the other community groups in Spain and we organized dreamOle, which is a community conference in Spain which is giving us really good times in the community, and we learned loads and it’s a really exciting conference to organize.

Julián Duque:
And that’s Julio Fernandez and, along with Laura Diaz and Pedro Molina, also organizes dreamOle, the main Salesforce community conference in Spain. I’m Julian Duque, your host for this Salesforce Developer Podcast. Here in the podcast, we share stories and insights from developers for developers. Today, we are going to talk with Julio, Laura and Pedro about dreamOle and how to organize dreaming community conference. Before we start, just as we left off, we will talk about their beginnings in the Salesforce community.

Laura Diaz:
My first experience with the community was in Paris. I was working there, and to be honest, I was feeling a bit lonely on that huge city. I attended one event organized by the admin group in Paris. From there, this is where I started to get to know more people and I ended up being into the London’s Calling community-led event. From there, this is where I actually meet other people and I started thinking, oh, that could be so cool to do some of this thing in our own country, because at this time, I already started to also attend more regularly the community meetings. I also started my own group of Women in Tech in Paris by the time.

Julián Duque:
Oh.

Laura Diaz:
Yeah, I did. And then, unfortunately I moved to Switzerland, where I’ve been for the last seven years. When I moved here, I also started my developer group in Geneva, too, where I was leading that for a while. I do certainly have a bit of experience over the years with the community.

Julián Duque:
That’s amazing. How was that experience of organizing a community on your own?

Laura Diaz:
At the beginning I was feeling, to be honest, quite lost because there was a lot of information and a lot of processes that I had to follow with Salesforce, but the Salesforce community is really amazing. I reached out to some people in the US, which now unfortunately I cannot remember the names, but they were so lovely that they jumped into a call and really got me through this full process and what to do, what not to do and how to get started. It was really amazing.
The beginnings were tough when it comes to people attending and people understanding why were you doing that, and also understanding that you were not getting nothing out of that. I was not being paid, that I was just putting my own time just because I wanted. At the beginning, really the people were not so willing to come because I think most of them thought that was a commercial Salesforce event, and I was certainly not trying to sell anything to anybody, right?

Julián Duque:
Yeah. It’s for certain people very difficult to understand that we organize these meetups or these conferences without expecting anything-

Laura Diaz:
Indeed.

Julián Duque:
… in exchange. My mom, for example, she’s always like, “But why you are spending that much time if you are not getting paid?”

Laura Diaz:
Totally, totally, yeah. It was the same. Even in my own company at the beginning, they were very willing to help me like, “Yeah, sure, let’s do that,” because I think they thought that they were going to get out of that for themselves. They actually did nothing. I was not really selling projects or anything. It was just a time where we would be sharing with other people about our successes, failures, some cool stuff that were coming out in the Salesforce ecosystem. It was really more like a hangout more than anything that you would get.

Julián Duque:
Yeah. What about you, Pedro? How was your first experience with the community?

Pedro Molina:
In a way, it was confusing because, well, I came from a different technology. I was working before to work with Salesforce, with SAP, and when I started in a company called FinancialForce that is now called Certinia, there were those groups… it was the Granada developer group organizing there. At that point in Granada, in the city where I live, Certinia was the only company working with Salesforce at that point, so at the beginning, I thought that it was a company thing. Someone within the company was organizing technical sessions with a beer or with something to eat and drink while someone is explaining things to the people that is interested in keep learning or hang out with colleagues, actually.
But then I start to talk with Juan and others, I realized that that was organized by actually one of your workmate, Alba Rivas, and she was doing that in her spare time. I was really surprised in a good way, actually, and was a nice experience. Actually, after that first meetup, I attended to the first dreamOle, the community conference in Spain, it was an amazing experience and was when I realized the size of the community, of the Salesforce community, how the people behave, the people that aim to keep learning, chatting and enjoy together, actually, because the people also wants to have a good time on those events.

Julián Duque:
Now let’s talk about dreamOle. Julio mentioned he was involved also in organizing dreamOle. Who started dreamOle, and when the conference started? When was the first dreamOle?

Julio Fernandez:
The first year I think was 2017, and I think it all started as a result of some of us attending London’s Calling, where I think Laura was there, Agustina was there as well. They had a really amazing time and they just mentioned that, “Why don’t we do something like this in Spain?” They got in touch with all of the community leaders, the local community group leaders back then, and we were all on board with the idea of organizing something similar and we just started talking and just having weekly meetings and just building ideas.
There was a bit of a brainstorming, just find what what name we want to do, also the idea that we didn’t want this to be always in the same city. Because we were local community leaders and we wanted all of the magic that happens in these events to come to our places as well, so that’s one of the key differentiator factors in dreamOle, that we change location every year. I think it’s also very, very interesting for everyone attending because there’s always something new to offer for people who come on a regular basis. That’s how it started. We just wanted to do something together and all of the local community leaders started building up on this and people started just loving it and we have a lot of fun organizing it. It’s still going on.

Julián Duque:
Nice. How was that first experience? I mean, organizing a conference for the first time has a lot of challenges. It is not an easy task, but how was that first experience for you all like?

Laura Diaz:
Sorry, maybe I jump in, if you don’t mind.

Julián Duque:
Please.

Laura Diaz:
It was really funny because it all started by, okay, once we got the name, the logo and so on, that it took a lot of time to decide on, it was okay, now we need a place. So we started to looking into places, and obviously we had zero money. Nothing. So we had to rent a place that was used as a yoga studio.

Julián Duque:
A yoga studio?

Laura Diaz:
Yes. It was a yoga studio. We got this place and we started to tell them about the event. Obviously to book it, we had to put money out our pockets, our own very pockets. It was really challenging also to know if people were going to come to the event, also to try to reach out to sponsors where nobody understood really what we were doing. The first year, it was mainly our own companies at the time that actually had us a sponsor and paid for that event, but it was actually really funny.
Also, the selling of the tickets, people were also not really getting why they would have to pay to go to a Salesforce event. Until the last two weeks or last week, we thought that we were going to go to the, I don’t know, to the street to say to the people, “Please come in for free. There is food. Please, come in.” Because at least we had to sold to our sponsors that they actually paid, but there were some people. That was really the funny thing. It was stressful, but then it was very, very rewarding, but it was really funny.

Julián Duque:
That’s good. It’s just scary to get into a project like this. I remember the first conference I organized back in 2013, we lost money. I mean, we weren’t able to get enough sponsorship and ticket sales and we lost money. We had to put money from our pockets and decided not to do anything the year after because it wasn’t sustainable. Gladly, later people understood that an event like this has impact, that it’s something that it is changing the community, and they decided to sponsor, but the first one is always the most difficult one. How many people attended the first dreamOle?

Julio Fernandez:
That’s what I was just about to say, that the first one, it was just around 100 people, oh, maybe between 100 and 150. The place was tiny and we ran into lots of problems. We had power cuts. No Wi-Fi, power cuts, no aircon, so just imagine that amount of people in a yoga studio.

Pedro Molina:
No aircon.

Laura Diaz:
It was like Bikram yoga, like the hot yoga. For free, included in the ticket.

Pedro Molina:
I remember at lunchtime, everything everywhere start to smell food-

Julián Duque:
Oh, no.

Pedro Molina:
… because it was so small, yeah.

Julio Fernandez:
Yeah, that was the thing, they were just cooking at the same venue and there wasn’t enough power to fit the kitchen and the aircon and everything else. It’s a funny thing to remember now, but it was very, very stressful at that time, but I mean, we had the support of our companies, and that was what triggered everything else running successfully. People were interested and we had a good turnout. It was definitely something that deserved continuing because even though we had some troubles, it was a really big success, definitely.

Pedro Molina:
I was an attendee at that first dreamOle and I have a really good memory about it. Everything was good.

Julián Duque:
Nice. That’s a good thing. What was that impact that you saw from the first event that you decided to continue in organizing the next year?

Laura Diaz:
We as a team also, we got to be friends, which, it was a bunch of people that we didn’t know each other at all. We had that really good connection, and also we saw how the people enjoyed that. There were really, really funny moments, and even though with all these things that happened during the day that were not so good, people still thought that for what they paid, they learned a lot, and also they had fun. This was very rewarding because we were working like crazy for a year and said like, “Okay, at least it was worth it.” People got a benefit out of that. They got out their job. Some of them paid for themselves, some others took holidays, so they also made an effort to be with us and they really… We thought we need to do it next time a bit better, right?

Julián Duque:
Yeah.

Laura Diaz:
Also, people started to understand the value of that and the word of mouth started playing a bit of a thing and we got more sponsorship, but honestly, it was the satisfaction on people, the feedback we’re getting from the attendees that made us go, wanted to make it better and bigger.

Julio Fernandez:
Yeah, and also, I think the opportunity of bringing, if you would like, Salesforce celebrities to a market that back then in 2017 wasn’t that big in Spain. You have a lot of people who work in the Salesforce ecosystem and you are listening to podcasts or watching videos and keynotes from Dreamforce, and having them next to you, it’s something very special that it’s easier to achieve when you have these kind of conferences. I think that’s also one of the key factors that people like, just being able to talk to the person that has developed the tool that you are working with on a daily basis.

Julián Duque:
And that’s very inspiring for people.

Julio Fernandez:
Absolutely.

Julián Duque:
They see that the people building these tools, the people working on the software you are using on your daily basis, they are just human beings like them. That brings reality into the situation and changes everything.

Julio Fernandez:
Yeah, and not everybody can go to Dreamforce for a whole week.

Julián Duque:
Oh, my God, yes.

Julio Fernandez:
So yeah, it’s really good to be able to have a cut-down version of the experience that you have in San Francisco in your local country, in your home country, so I think it’s a beautiful thing to do.

Pedro Molina:
And this keep happening, actually. I remember you, Laura, a couple of years ago, the first dreamOle after the COVID, you were about to quit.

Laura Diaz:
Oh, yes, certainly. Many times.

Pedro Molina:
That’s true, but I remembered you, your face after the dreamOle, in the after party, I mean, you feel exhausted, but you were so happy to have organized this, to see the people enjoying and see happy faces around you that you continue actually at the end.

Laura Diaz:
That is very certainly true. Every year I think like, I mean, I cannot do that anymore because with the job, the kids and this extra job that you got on your hands is too much, but then I go there, I enjoy the day so much that I go, “Okay, another one. Another round.” You are certainly right.

Julián Duque:
And especially you see the impact, the people that comes to you and thanks you and the lives you are changing, that’s pretty much what pays for the event. This is what I told my mom, for example. This is the payment that I’m getting. [inaudible 00:17:16] the impact.

Julio Fernandez:
It’s very rewarding.

Julián Duque:
Exactly.

Julio Fernandez:
Yeah. It’s a really good reward to take back home with you.

Laura Diaz:
It is, yeah.

Julián Duque:
What happened during the pandemic?

Julio Fernandez:
Oh, hell.

Julián Duque:
Did you organize a virtual event or just took vacation?

Laura Diaz:
No, because we’ve always wanted to be a in-person event.

Pedro Molina:
Yeah, but we organized…

Laura Diaz:
Ah, I forgot about this. You’re right.

Julio Fernandez:
[foreign language 00:17:43], yeah, by remote camp.

Pedro Molina:
Also, we give the chance to the speakers we had selected to run a session, online sessions, I mean, under the dreamOle branch, because technology progress, and so the session that you have prepared for this year, for the next year or whenever it’s going to be the next dreamOle at the point, this session most probably is deprecated. So, yeah, we had a few things.

Julio Fernandez:
Yeah. I mean, the main event, we wanted it to keep being an in-person event, but we decided to just run a few sessions and to give the opportunity to our sponsors to be seen because they were still supporting us. Nobody said, “I want my money back.” It was a way of just appreciating the fact that they were still with us and just taking life as you take when you live these kind of situations. So we decided just to do a bit of online thing, but still keep working towards the next. We thought we could do it in August or September-

Laura Diaz:
It was so nice. So nice.

Julio Fernandez:
… in the same year. But also, there was a bit of panic moment because this happened two weeks before dreamOle was scheduled and everything was ready. Everything was ready, so it was like, really? Is this happening? It was all ready. It was a whole year of work to just have to postpone everything. And then, when we came back to organizing it again, it was like starting from zero, even if everything was ready for 2020.

Julián Duque:
Yeah, I can imagine that. So I guess the conference has been growing since the beginning. The last edition, how many people attended, for example?

Laura Diaz:
It was around 400.

Julián Duque:
400?

Laura Diaz:
Yeah, almost 400.

Pedro Molina:
Three, three.

Laura Diaz:
394. We checked that the other day.

Julián Duque:
That’s 400.

Laura Diaz:
Yeah, exactly. No, honestly, it’s been growing, but the last years, we have been actually cutting down to a certain number because we don’t want to make it that big that it will not feel as a family. I think we need to find always the right balance on the numbers so that people would not feel overwhelmed, because if you feel overwhelmed, at the end you don’t speak to anybody and you tend to go in isolation, and we want really people to feel good to talk to other people they’ve never met. I think with this kind of number, we actually managed to do that. Because I’ve been to Dreamforce several times and then there’s so much people that is like, wow, too much, and at the end, really you only speak to your only friends, but if you are alone, you would not really speak to many people, so that’s one thing we want to avoid. From 100 the first year, we’ve grown quite a lot to 400 last year in Seville.

Julián Duque:
That’s a lot. And the same happens with the team, I guess?

Laura Diaz:
Not really. The team size has been a bit more constant. I think we’ve always been around six, seven maximum, but obviously we’ve had through the years some people in and out because obviously life changes and you have all the priorities or different things happen, but the team size has been always almost the same.

Julio Fernandez:
Yeah. What we’ve had is more volunteers on the day, because initially it was just us. We were organizing everything, but then people said, “I’m happy to help. Count on me and I will help on the day.” That’s been also really good to have, people just out of the blue just saying, “I’m here to help. I can collaborate.” That’s also something to appreciate and we are very thankful because, as the event grows, it’s really, really needed.

Julián Duque:
Nice. Pedro, you mentioned that the first year, you were an attendee, right? What made you say, “Okay, I want to contribute. I want to jump in and organize,” or help or volunteer on this event or on this community?

Pedro Molina:
Well, I’m not really sure. Mostly, well, I think that mostly is that I enjoyed the first dreamOle, and also the second, I was a speaker at those two dreamOles. I just wanted to participate because, well, what Laura and Julio said before, the people enjoy and you want to contribute and to give a hand. Actually, they proposed me as a new member when someone else left, I don’t remember who, but-

Laura Diaz:
Agustina.

Pedro Molina:
Ah, Agustina left, right?

Laura Diaz:
Yeah.

Pedro Molina:
I was working in the same company and Agustina, so maybe she proposed me and I said, “Yes, of course.”

Julián Duque:
Nice. Keeping up the legacy.

Laura Diaz:
That’s going to happen a few times, actually, where people have, either we have reached out to people that we saw certain affinity to ourselves that were volunteers, that they have come for the event, and some other peoples, the people have reached out to us like, “Hey, if there’s a free spot, let us know and I would like to participate and be an organizer, too.”

Julián Duque:
Nice. Is there going to be a dreamOle 2024?

Julio Fernandez:
Yes. It’s already getting prepared.

Julián Duque:
Nice.

Pedro Molina:
Already announced.

Julio Fernandez:
Yeah, we’ve already announced the chosen city and the date. The tickets can be purchased today. Well, as of today, yes. It’s going to be in Granada, which is one of the longest communities in Spain, I believe. When I moved back to Spain in 2015, it was already active and it’s one of the oldest I remember, so it really deserves to have dreamOle.

Pedro Molina:
It seems the oldest. It was the first one in Spain.

Julio Fernandez:
Probably the first one. Yeah, probably the first one.

Laura Diaz:
I think so. I think so.

Julio Fernandez:
Yeah, it deserves to have dreamOle this year. Everybody’s really excited. We are all very excited and it’s a very beautiful city, so I invite everyone to come along and enjoy it and just try to prove me wrong.

Julián Duque:
Now we are going to be sharing all the links in the show notes, so you start buying your ticket. Also, is there a call for proposals or you already selected the speakers for the next event?

Laura Diaz:
No. We will be opening the call for proposals probably in the next days, right?

Pedro Molina:
Yeah.

Laura Diaz:
Every year, what we do is we choose the speakers very blindly. When you actually submit the proposals to us, we hide the names and we only vote based on the abstract and title, so please, if you are applying to be a speaker in dreamOle, do put attention and effort into writing a proper description of your talk and the title because that’s how we choose the speakers. We do not choose on the stars, we do not choose on names. We really choose on content.

Julián Duque:
That’s the way to go.

Pedro Molina:
And please, don’t use ChatGPT. All the abstract ChatGT looks the same.

Julián Duque:
I was going to mention something like that.

Julio Fernandez:
Make it catchy, make it human.

Julián Duque:
Now I’m tempted to submit a proposal.

Pedro Molina:
Yeah, we’d love to see you.

Laura Diaz:
Let’s do a challenge. Just submit a proposal and we try to know if you did it with ChatGPT or not.

Julián Duque:
Oh, yeah, no, no, no. Not with ChatGPT, my own proposal, of course. My own proposal, of course.

Laura Diaz:
That would be great.

Pedro Molina:
Please send it.

Julián Duque:
Beautiful. I wish that the next dreamOle is going to be a success and hoping, let’s see, because I always wanted to go, maybe next year I have the opportunity.

Laura Diaz:
It would be great to have you.

Julián Duque:
Yeah. Before we close, each of you, I want you to give advice to any person that is listening us right now that wants to organize an event like this in the region. What advice do you have for them? Start with Laura.

Laura Diaz:
For me, it’s that you should know that it’s very rewarding, but you also have a big responsibility against the people that you are holding, first your attendees and your sponsors. One of the advices I would give is purchase insurance, civil responsibility insurance. I know it’s very paperwork-like, but this is the kind of things you forget and is very important because you can get stolen, things can happen. You never know, so better be prepared.

Julián Duque:
And it is not expensive.

Laura Diaz:
It is not expensive indeed and then it allows you to sleep at night, so please do it. That’s my advice.

Julián Duque:
Solid advice. Julio, what about you?

Julio Fernandez:
My advice is to enjoy it and just make the people you work with happy. Make them happy and collaborate. Turn your camera on when you’re having remote calls because it helps. Yes, just enjoy your time and make the most of just… You are doing this for free and you’re directing this to the community, so you have to enjoy it. It cannot be an obligation, so yeah, enjoy it.

Julián Duque:
True. Pedro, what about you?

Pedro Molina:
Well, don’t be afraid of asking. The Salesforce community is a huge community and there is a lot of people with large experience that will be really happy to help you, always. There are several channels for asking us for a hand.

Julián Duque:
Yes. And my advice will be, please, get yourself a team that shares your dream, a team that you can trust and a team that you feel comfortable working with, as the team we have here today with Laura, Julio and Pedro. Thank you. Thank you very much for joining me on this special episode of the Salesforce Developer Podcast and looking forward to have you all on our next episode.

Laura Diaz:
Thank you for having us and really hope to see you all in dreamOle 2024.

Julio Fernandez:
Yeah. Thank you very much for the invite.

Pedro Molina:
Thank you very much.

Julián Duque:
If you want to learn more about the show, head on to developer.salesforce.com/podcast, where you can hear all the episodes and read the show notes. We will be taking the next week off for Christmas, so we wish you a happy holidays and a happy new year. Thank you everybody and talk to you in 2024.

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