Growing Agency Success with People-Centric Values and Open Source Education

Anne Bovelett:
Hello everybody. Welcome to another episode of Open Channels fm. I’m your host today. My name is Anne Bovelett. I am a big fan of accessibility and I’m your host today. With me are Rahul Bansal and Aviral Mittal from a very well known agency located in India called rtCamp. Welcome.

Rahul Bansal:
Thanks for having us here.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah, I’m really glad you could join. I know you are very busy, you’re doing a lot of projects. Could you tell me more about your agency?

Rahul Bansal:
So we have been a WordPress agency since 2009. We started with smaller projects like more like helping early stage blogger. Because WordPress was mainly a blogging framework in old days. And over the time we grew up to take bigger client and now working with some of the largest companies globally within the WordPress space.

Anne Bovelett:
That’s really huge. Like 2009. That is like 15, 16 years. 16 years. 16 years now.

Rahul Bansal:
Yeah. Yeah. Wow.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah. And you Avril, when did you join or did you join from the start?

Aviral Mittal:
Oh no, I joined in 2021. Yeah. So it’s been more than four years now. Four and a half.

Anne Bovelett:
Okay, wonderful. So just a bit of a background for the audience. So I met Aviral at a work camp. I think it was in Porto. No.

Aviral Mittal:
No, I think we met first in Taipei.

Anne Bovelett:
Ah yeah. Taipei. Yeah. Yeah. That was wild. That was a long journey. Yeah. And yeah, and one of the things we got to talk about was about my favorite topic. I’m always driving everybody up the wall because I always speak about accessibility. And at some point accessibility became a big topic in Europe because of the European Accessibility act that was coming in end of June of this year. But I think there are many agencies that already understood that accessibility actually increases conversion on websites because the more users you can service, the bigger your potential conversion is. Right. So Rahul, when did you realize what accessibility really means? Because if I think of this from my perspective, I’ve been in WordPress since 2007. It was only six years ago that I discovered how important it actually is. What about you?

Rahul Bansal:
So how do I put like the legal side? I discovered little late like but early on. So how do I put like. We ended up having some focus on accessibility without realizing we are doing accessibility work, for example. So accessibility is usually low on priority list unless it’s legally required. We try to educate client but in the end they are the one who caused the shot. So is their budget their side? So they will have final say. But then SEO is always top on their list. And some part of accessibility like semantic markup, image altags and many attributes kind of help accessibility. Some part which are not SEO friendly like keyboard navigation helps accessibility but also helps power user. And I myself is a big fan of keyboard navigation. Like for one reason or other I prefer to navigate via keyboard. So that personal preference lead to making sure that there are keyboard shortcuts, keyboard navigation, tab indexes early on the work we do.

Anne Bovelett:
Oh I recognize that so well I am from that generation that started without a mouse. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Navigating by keyboard is like second nature. Is that the same for you Aviral or are you fervently using the mouse or your trackpad?

Aviral Mittal:
Oh no, I have been using a mouse ever since I have been using a computer so.

Rahul Bansal:
So it’s not the same for me.

Aviral Mittal:
I’m not used to keyboard navigation. But yes, in terms of accessibility I think more than that. Like even color contrast, even how we interact generally like if someone needs more zoom for the text, all of those things, some of those things matter to me as well.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah, I’m so glad to hear it. Now I really would like to put the spotlight on you because I know you are also big on education. Would you like to tell me more about that?

Rahul Bansal:
Yeah. So how do I put like as I mentioned like we were focused on small businesses in early days so there were like naturally constraint to like how much we can charge and then by that effect how much we can pay. So we. So in early days we ended up going to these colleges education institute to hire fresher and train them on WordPress and there was one more reason like when we started WordPress was very small in the market share and the number of opportunities it had. So finding people who knew WordPress engineering like the theme and plugin development already was very hard in India and then we were growing very fast. So for multiple reason ended up we being more aligned to the like the academics. So we have the network of 900 colleges right now like which we built over the 16 years and every year we send WordPress courses to many colleges. Some of them teach WordPress development as part of their curriculum. So we end up getting a lot of student in the ecosystem. Many of them join rtCamp as it is. We also have a paid training program. By paid training program I mean like college student usually when they were. When they’re still in college like so in India common system is four year engineering course which is divided into semesters and in the eighth semester like the last six months students are expected to work in Corporate like some kind of internship or some, some other thing like that. So we came up with this paid training program, paid internship where people get 6 month like full time paid job to learn WordPress. We train them very well, like to like theme plugin development, architecture, everything. Like it’s a comprehensive course. The course is in public domain from long time release under the Creative Commerce License. So, so this course has become very popular over the years because the course has no strings attached. Like people can enter the course, learn WordPress as long as they love it and leave whenever they want without having to face any kind of penalties or any kind of separation fees. So this kind of gives student a chance to explore WordPress and the course also includes contributing to the WordPress course. So as part of the course we send the students to the WordPress core itself where they work with other core committers. So this, this overall is a very nice experience. And this not only gives them the exposure to the WordPress but also exposure to the open source. Something which is we value a lot. Like we believe that student need to have a buy in and passion for open source and that’s only when they contribute, when they can contribute better. So every year like we get like 100,000 applications. Like we are not that big. We, we end up like hiring 60, sometimes 80. This year we aim to hire 100 people from the colleges and we teach them WordPress without any lock in or any kind of expectation that they have to work for us. They can join our competitors, we are perfectly cool. They can Join any other WordPress agency, product, company, start their own freelancing. We just encourage them to learn WordPress and understand how the open source communities work. Like the contribution system, the communication system, wires like and other things.

Anne Bovelett:
I almost have no words. That is so amazing. I’m flabbergasted because the numbers you’re mentioning giving people such a chance. That really is very commendable. So you’re telling me you’re hiring about 60 a year to 100 and this is rtCamp hiring these people?

Rahul Bansal:
Yeah, yeah. And we also give a lot of exposure to the students. So many people who do not make it to the rtCamp still end up learning WordPress and get hired by other WordPress businesses like mostly in India. We don’t have any tracking because our course is literally public. Like people don’t even have to register or give their private information to learn the course. So many students learn and sometimes we get to know that when they, when they get a job they write an email that Hey, I couldn’t get into RTCAM but your course helped me get a job in WordPress and I’m working at so and so company. Just like a thank you email those kind. And then that is when we realize, okay, people are getting jobs outside WordPress. So our job is very popular because we pay literally three to four times than the largest five IT consulting firm. Like they are like multi billion dollar corporations and we pay them, we pay students three to four times more than them. And unlike those large corporations which require you to serve them two years to recover their return on investment in training, we make it open. Like you stay with us only if you love us or if you love WordPress. If you only love WordPress, feel free to switch to any other WordPress business. So that kind of culture helps us attracted a lot of eyeballs. In fact there is a thread on Reddit where somebody felt like this is too good to withdraw, must be some kind of scam. Like there has to be some kind of in it. And for us it’s working so we don’t bother. It’s like, yeah, oh that’s.

Anne Bovelett:
Could you share the link to that thread and the link to this information? Could people from outside of India also join your courses?

Rahul Bansal:
So how do I put like. So the things are evolving like so very first iteration of course. So we have been training people for WordPress literally from the beginning. Like I trained my co founders in 2009, like one on one. Then until 2014 I used to train people myself. Then in 14 we had a like a classroom kind of training structured program, structured joining. Like people can only join like in January and July, but they used to join in office because we also wanted people to know each other, like have that academic feeling like hey, we are, we are from the same batch, we are from the like we graduated in the same year. So. So that kind of bonding I wanted to cultivate. So the program remained mostly in office until 2019. So during COVID we were forced to make. So we were remote I think from 2014, but the program was not remote until 2019. The idea was people used to came to Pune where we are headquartered in India and they used to learn WordPress in a classroom like style. And during the training program there is more to it because engineering is one side. Working in open source requires empathy and communication skills also. So we conduct workshops about how to talk, how to respond, there can be angry users, how to do support and many things we cover in the training program like the personality development soft skills courses. So that’s why it was a good experience in person until 2019. Then it went remote and now it is like how to put like it’s remote, like so from last five years, course has been remote. It’s remote, but sync. Like everybody gets on a zoom call. There has been session recording. There has been communication workshops happening on Zoom. And now from last two, three years, we are trying to make it async because we need to make it a sync so that people can join anytime from anywhere. And that is the only way we can take it global. So the next goal is close.

Anne Bovelett:
So.

Rahul Bansal:
So the training part is still made for India in that sense, but the course is public. Anybody can benefit from the course.

Anne Bovelett:
Okay. Oh, that’s wonderful. So I can imagine you have big word camps in India. Like I always used to call the word Camp Ahmedabad, the unofficial word Camp India because it was so big. And now you have WordCamp Asia. Right. So are you planning to meet up and organize something for students that are able to join the word camp?

Rahul Bansal:
So how to put like. Students usually show up at word camps naturally if it is in their city. Many word camps in India happen in college buildings, like so they get exposure. I am more focused on taking WordPress into the colleges rather than bringing students to the WordCamp because bringing them to WordCamp is just like a one, two day experience. It’s a good experience. Like it has its own value and it’s happening already. So we put less focus on that. We put more focus on putting like WordPress into the college courses. So it’s like people student can learn WordPress over six months in much involved away.

Anne Bovelett:
Okay, yeah, I understand. So and in your course, do you have a separate chapter for accessibility or is that woven in everywhere?

Rahul Bansal:
It’s woven in everywhere. But we have been thinking to create a complete module like so there are two part. Like the public course is like our baseline course which has, I would say slower iteration cycle. Our internal training program uses our public course and also uses some recorded videos and some kind of webinars like so. And the webinar part is keep changing. It’s more like case studies. So people. So whatever. We do recent work, some cool work. Those engineers go to these zoom calls and present whatever they’re working on. So accessibility is most often covered in case like in these seminars. But we are planning to put a separate module around accessibility in our public course this year. This means like in 2026.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah. That’s wonderful. I mean, I’m always happy to hear those things. I know you are a WordPress VIP agency partner. And to see and to hear that you do this and also reach out to people to learn that is absolutely making you stand out in the market, I think. And training people in general. But also I don’t know how you call it. And when I translate it directly from Dutch, we would say you are raising your own staff in your own pond. I don’t know what the English expression for that would be. I sometimes get in trouble with England English.

Rahul Bansal:
So actually we were raising the. Like how do I put like. So training is. Let me put this way. We haven’t invented this training thing. It has been common in India. So first like India has a huge population. So so many IT consulting firm including the like the companies, the product companies. Like some of the top US companies have offshore centers in India and they also run this training programs. So training program has been very common in India. But training program were never open. Like everybody was teaching what they want and there were like guardrails that like our secret sauce should not go outside.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah.

Rahul Bansal:
So that’s like typical closed source behavior. Like they were teaching students things that were not or not transferable or less useful across the companies. Like they want to trend more like a captive audience like which can serve them. But if they decide to leave, the company has less value outside their organization. And so we took the better part of their structure. Like because there are like some shortcomings in the education system that where people become the engineers. But sometimes they are not able to produce a good quality work. Like there has been some surveys like 90%, some or large percent number of engineers in India are unemployable things like that. So everybody is fixing it in private for their need. Like say if a large corporation need thousand engineers, they will pick thousand from the pool and only care about those thousand. So that is where we try to do things differently. Like we put our training program public. We made it to the colleges, we made it even under the CC0 license. So this is an incident like I’m branching a little bit here. An Indian company like copied our training program completely and hosted internally. And one of their employees figured out like hey, this is a RTCAMS training program which is their kind of learning from the intranet. And so he reached out to us trying to complain about his employer. And we told him like hey, we are. We release it under Creative Commons. So whatever your boss is doing is perfectly fine. You’re more than welcome to learn it in your intranet. More than welcome to show up at our site. We don’t ask for registration. And then I kind of reach out to. So there’s a WhatsApp group of, of Indian businesses. Like I told them, like we don’t have any sign up registration requirement on our training program. You are more than welcome to scrap copy. If you want data wisdom, I can give you data wisdom. Or if you want people to just visit our site, feel free. We are not asking them to register, so we are not tracking your employees. So this kind of openness is missing in the large corporations where everybody’s trying to solve their own problems. This is probably more like paying it forward. Like we took a lot from open source and we wanted to give as much as back. So we’ve made training program open source. So first we made training program open source. Then we also made training video open source. So our training videos are on our YouTube channel. We also again told people like if you want to download from YouTube and upload in their private Vimeo, whatever account, we are cool with that. So we are like trying to. So it’s like 100 students like we are hiring next year is our responsibility. I mean we will train them, we will pay them for training, but we cannot pay for thousand. Like we are not that big company, but we want to train thousand people, 10,000 people. We want to train people in open Source and in WordPress and that the only way we could do is by open sourcing our tooling training videos and as much part of the training source as we can do without having like significant overhead for us because we are bootstrapped at the end. We cannot run like thousand people’s training program because it has a real cost. Like it’s like we need teachers, we need trainers, but material we keep open sourcing whenever we find.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah, I’m so happy to hear this. Right. This philosophy of doing for what’s good for yourself is nice. Doing what’s good for thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands or even millions of people. That’s bliss. And I think this is one of the strong sides of the WordPress community in general. But the way you do it is when I hear this is absolutely unique. And I’m also going to share the link to your YouTube channel in the show notes with everybody. And there’s another thing that just came to my mind because one of the things the people in Open Channel FM told me, they said, hey, we are really happy that you are talking to someone from India because we don’t hear so much from the Indian agencies in general. And I thought, well, you know, let’s just ask because I Know that in Europe a lot of companies are working together with Indian companies and then they will run into some cultural differences that they don’t understand. Is there something you would like to tell us about that? How what is that like for you?

Rahul Bansal:
So if you remember I mentioned in our training program we also cover non engineering aspect like the communication style and soft skill empathy. So that actually helps us bridge the gap between I would say east and West. So we rarely run into those issues because first like me and the other seniors we have. We have grown over the time. So we kind of. We had. We got time to use. Get used to it. Like the holidays, the cultural. The nitty gritties, the linguistic things like. Like in US people discuss politics very openly in work culture and they can be still respectful even in with each other even if their political views differ. In India it’s less common. Like discussing politics at work is very rare. Unless you are really good friend. Then you go for a tea or coffee and you discuss it there. But usually in common gathering like people avoid sensitive discussion around politics, religion and many other things. So there are cultural differences for sure. But then how we. So the kind of. I would say the. So the people who join RT Camberley learn and bridge these differences over the time. And we put our learning into our internal training course. Like and that is where. So we have like a teachers in training course. Like they kind of take this like communication exercises where they kind of try to make this student ready like so usually when they. When they go into production like on client work their age is around 22 years old. Generally like 21, 22 years old. They haven’t seen much of the world apart from movies and which is not an actual representation of any culture. Like movies are very like. Like depending on what genre you watch, which studio you follow. It’s like you will get a different perspective. So they. They kind of normalize these things like how to communicate across culture. For example India it’s very common to refer to anybody senior as sir which we’ve. And in US when I started working like so our first. So my. My literal first client my of my freelancing journey was from Germany. And we have been getting. Our 90% clientele is from the west. Like mostly Europe. Germany like the Europe US even on the east like the Australia and like that. So it’s like. So first thing I realized that people across age group across higher skis call each other by first name. And so these are like small things but we kind of pick them and some of them installed into rtCamp culture so that there is a less cultural gap between east and west. And some of them we put through our training program like so how to put like so you mentioned like just few minutes back that you hear less from India, right? Or less so in general so so considering the size of population there are very less outspoken people from India like across the board. Not just like tech across the board we are more like listener kind of tribe. We listen, we don’t speak. And a side effect of this is that when working sometimes you can do better. But since you have been your upbringing has been that boss is always right or elder people are always right or seniors are always right. You don’t question like so so when client comes to you and asks you to do something you just do it. You don’t question and by not questioning it you sometimes miss opportunity to do things better. I will give you like a real life example that happened on one of our project. Like a project had a wait list feature like E commerce project we are building and they had a huge waste. Wait list product was viral. There was always like wait list. So the client one day sent a task like this is very early like I think 2010 or 11 that hey can I get. And the wait list was built using Gravity form, something like that. Yeah, it was Gravity form very early days of Gravity form and we were like so the request came that can we get a CSV dump of all the people who signed up yesterday? Like every. So we created a cron job and every like 4am in every morning we were sending email addresses in a CSV format that signed up for like in the last 24 hours. So out of curiosity I asked like what are you doing with the CSV dumps? And oh, we are importing them to MailChimp. I said do you know from Gravity form we can send directly data to MailChimp? They said I don’t know. Oh so this is what happens when you don’t question like so what they said was technically doable. Nothing wrong in there could be other reason for having CSV dump but their use case. So by asking their use case we could give them better solution. And this is something we created as a part of cultural framework like our communication framework. Like always ask next question like why you want something like try to understand the use cases. Try to understand the impact of work we have. And this is a. When I mentioned that in training so this is something is not covered by the public course I don’t know how we can cover it. In public course. But the intent is there and this is always in open source across like if you’re contributing to the WordPress core, you need to talk. You cannot just go after solving every issue. Sometimes the issue could be invalid, sometimes there could be a radically different solution. And the only way to figure out is to have a conversation. And this is what I mean by teaching people something that is not engineering but helps in deliver better engineering.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah, the example that you just gave is absolutely clear. I recognize that I was not aware of the cultural difference up until like, well, in a working environment, I have to say, up until like five or six years ago and I had a big project and for some reason everything went wrong. And so I decided to outsource it to an Indian agency. And I recognized what you’re saying, they weren’t asking questions and we just asked them, please make it work. And the customer we were working for unfortunately insisted on using Elementor, which five years ago was more problematic than it is today. And I remember that the customer said, I want this animation to be exactly like this. And then over, I don’t know, 12 different breakpoints. And I was trying to explain to her, forget about these breakpoints. And then it turned out she was looking at her website on a 13 inch screen and I said, your website looks like a mess on a bigger screen. And she said, no, it’s not true, my site looks fantastic. And it absolutely did not. So I sent her some screenshots and then she started demanding, I want more breakpoints. And then the Indian agency said, well, we can do that. And I was not so much looking into the code because I’m originally a designer, I know a lot about HTML and css, but I was not going into things really, really deep. And then it turned out they had even put in functions into the site that I didn’t ask for. And it took a long time to straighten out with this agency because I could feel that their intentions were good, but we were just like water and oil. It just would not mix at all. Yeah. And I think it’s a good thing that we are talking about this today because I don’t hear about this so much and it would really help also on our side to have more understanding on that part. And I think that is also. It may sound strange to you, but to me that is also part of inclusion. You know, understanding each other’s culture, understanding each other’s working culture because we are doing our jobs. Nobody is supposed to just unquestionably do whatever they’re told and then get punished for it later. Right. So yeah, I think this is a fascinating subject in. In general also in design.

Rahul Bansal:
Yeah, in design project. Since you mentioned design, I just want to highlight one thing. So. So we are engineering heavy company. So we. We have this. We have substantial projects where client come with designer and they have their own vision which we appreciate, admire. But at the same time, like again, accessibility and other things, engineering constraint, core web vital. We assess the impact of the design and early on the project, since we made the culture of proactive communication, we reach out to designers sometimes in the client designer us in the same call and we try to find a middle ground. Like hey, can we make few changes where your aesthetics will look almost same or similar, but engineering performance and accessibility will be much better and they appreciate it because it’s not like so sometimes people have limited understanding. So they know design, they know conversion, they do things in their way. It is our job to tell them like, hey, there are three ways to do this thing and the way you are suggesting can harm core web vitals or performance or user experience. And if we do, it’s slightly different, like some minor changes in effects or animation or like things like that. It will turn out to be nice. And sometimes we build it at our own cost, demo it to gain their confidence and then the designer agree, this is perfect like this. This is perfectly acceptable. Perfectly acceptable deviation from my original vision. And. And that’s how we score win. Like if we just listen and follow orders, then we will end up harming the client’s interest and at the end of the day designer will feel bad because they have taken a project which will not achieve the success they intended to do. So there are things about, and there are many decisions like this in a large project where collaboration is required and collaboration can only Happen when we treat each other equal. Something we installed in our company’s name. So the RTCAM’s full name is RoundtableCam and Roundtable is literally come from the roundtable from the British history. Like everybody who sits around it is equal. So we can all talk without having any kind of pressure, like, hey, I joined RTCAM five years back, you are 15 years back. Or this client is such a, such a big client. This client has such a VP title, this title that no, we forget everything. We are only talking about tech, engineering, web and we don’t have to worry about each other’s background or like hierarchy during the conversation. It’s a pure merit based conversation.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah. Oh that’s, that’s a great way to work at things. I think this is something that a lot of European and American companies should do as well because hierarchy can also be something that is an obstacle. Right.

Rahul Bansal:
I have seen clients from like us, you know, actually reminding proactively to like, like to tell the developers that hey, if there is something, please talk to us. Like don’t assume we know everything. So I have seen that a lot. But it’s just like the cultural upbringing is such that people are not raised to question. Like so a lot of like I would say majority people in South Asia, not just India, like even Pakistan, Bangladesh. So the culture has been, you do not question your elders, like be it your teacher, be it your father, your elder brother, even people with slightly white hair, you do not question them.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah, yeah. I’m Dutch, as you may know, but I live in Germany. And even between the Netherlands and Germany, the cultural differences in business are very different. So the Dutch are very straightforward and very direct up to a level that makes other people uncomfortable. We’re not always aware of it. And then when you come to Germany, for example, it is extremely hierarchical. And this is also I think a challenge for a big agency like yours when you are dealing with different kinds of countries in Europe because every country in that regard is also very different. It’s really challenging. But I’m really excited to be talking about this because normally of course, I’m always talking about accessibility, accessibility, accessibility. But this too is such an important topic. And one of the things I’m really curious about is if we’re talking about this in specific. Right? Let’s say imagine you are really old and you are telling stories to your grandchildren. What is the one thing in your career at rtCamp that is so? Remember, how do you say that is so? Has made such an impact that you would tell them about it oh so.

Rahul Bansal:
There are many stories hard to pick one. I think my most favorite is like this around building this round table culture because I built it like not just, just I didn’t like try to make people proactive but I also took things from west like for example in India. Like a reason India has such a global big market share in outsourcing is even people are generally less proactive is because they’re hard working. So they make it up by doing twice the amount of work. So it’s like they will do things probably the way it was ordered. It was technically not ordered but it was written. And then everything is every instruction they take it as order. But then when things goes to demo and production they will work extra hours sometimes in night, sometimes in weekend to fix things. And I had objection to that also. So my idea was that I don’t want to work on weekends. So I don’t want my employees to work on weekends, weekend. So 40 hours per week is like a strong cap like and to enforce it I. So, so, so how do I enforce it? Like sometimes I come across some ideas like on weekend but I hold them. I schedule slack messages to go on Monday morning because I don’t want to give people to see me working on weekend. I’m not working, I’m just browsing Internet, sharing some links. But I don’t want you, I want to avoid that also. So this creating that culture requires a lot of thinking I would say and micro decisions and micro behavior. So creating this culture has been my best experience. Like people have built much bigger companies in India in much shorter time. So size of business, number of people we hired, big logos we want, those are secondary at the center of it, the culture we built and we have extremely low attrition rate. Something I’m very proud of a reason is that because RTKM never had any layoff like no layoff in Covid in any up and down in market. Once we hire people it’s like government job like that safety we managed to build. So that is my favorite part the people centric nature of rtCamp.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah, you probably noticed I’m a bit lost for words because I am so incredibly impressed to hear all these things. It makes me so happy and I really hope there are other agencies and Companies in the WordPress community in India that adopt this wow, how would you say it? This, this philosophy, this, this method. Because I think it makes the world a better place in general.

Rahul Bansal:
And also people fail to understand sometimes like oh look, I won’t say fail to understand this Sometimes overlook the people aspect of it servicing. So any kind of consulting business is people’s business in my opinion. In the end, no matter. I might be going on sales call, closing a deal, but it’s in the end the client will be spending more time with my engineers. So if my engineer love my client and the projects I’m bringing to them, they are going to do much better. And the only way they are going to love it is when they love rtCampus. Like when they feel like it’s their home, it’s their place. So by so people centric business is also like morals aside, economically is the right way to build things. Like rather than exploiting people, make them love the place you are building. You have to make some like adjustments but in long run they are worth like because there are many projects I’m not even involved at all. But I see the passion in which engineers are delivering. The passion comes from ownership. And you can only own a place where you feel you belong there. Like you cannot feel ownership in like, in like where you feel like a guest.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah, I can imagine it feels like, you know, loyalty create loyalties. And I think if I hear what you’re saying, you are actually being very loyal to your employees as an employer. And I think employership is not the easiest thing. Some agencies underestimate it. I think many start an agency and then they’re with three and then they’re with four and then they come into this phase where you’re like, oh, we have to grow, but who is going to teach them? And then you are suddenly responsible for so many people’s lives. For their mortgage, for their rent, for their children, their grandchildren, everything. Yeah, yeah. And I think people tend to forget this. Right. And then all they see is when you come onto the stage of a conference and you stand there and they’re like, oh, look at this big agency owner. And that people don’t realize how, what the impact is on you as a human being when you start out this adventure. Right?

Rahul Bansal:
Yeah. And there is like. And it’s a constant evolving journey like so you have to be mindful of your role and your responsibility towards your employees. For example, when anybody used to join rtCamp in early days, people used to greet each other like welcome them saying welcome to RT family. Like we have many words where RT is a prefix. And we used to, so when we were small there were, there were much more sense of family. We used to eat together, we used to spend like many times. Many employees used to spend weekend together like play cricket, watch movies. There Were a lot of. So this was become like the extension of their academic life. Like people made friends for life and we were in office company so the bonding was easy. So as with the growth we went remote. And when we were crossing 100 I literally said like in town hall and like to the leadership that stop calling things as Aarti family because we may not be able to live up to that promise. So we will try our best to maintain our culture but let’s not over promise by calling each other family because now I don’t even remember everybody’s name because when we were 50, 60 it was. I knew everybody by name, where they came from, what they graduated. Now I don’t even know like how many people are joining. So it’s like next month is a January. So January will be that time where people join our WordPress training program. So it’s like so if you don’t, even if you cannot give that much attention, stop calling each other family because it will look now phony. Like it will look pretentious when you call family, you should mean it. So. So only promise things that you can deliver even during, even as a part of culture, like the small things matters don’t set expectation higher.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah, that’s. That’s true. So so can I ask you how many employees does RT currently have? rtCampus.

Rahul Bansal:
Probably 250 something. Yeah. Almost 240. And we will be having probably 30. 20, 30 people joining in January.

Anne Bovelett:
Wow, that’s a lot of people to manage.

Rahul Bansal:
Yeah, yeah. But it’s working smoothly because so everybody has some. Not everybody. I would say 90% people. More than 90% people started their journey with RTKAM so they have only seen this good site where people were helpful, everybody went out of their way to help them succeed. And since we had no layoff culture and I have been very strict about it like there will be never layoff. So there was never insecurity. Like they were not like a crab mentality that hey if I help somebody they will grow up and I will like pain. So so that never happened and that kind of helps people become more collaborative. So so it’s like the size is growing but things are smooth. Like people are able to people manage or work with each other quite efficiently. Like because ever so. So the senior has. Has this like hey I have been helped by others so paying it forward attitude is there at the workplace also like during the management also.

GoDaddy Sponsor Announcer:
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Anne Bovelett:
Wow. You know I will honestly say if I were in India, you really sound like a company that I would want to Work with. Absolutely. Yeah. I have another question. It may sound trivial, but I’ve been curious about it. Where does your name come from? rtCamp?

Rahul Bansal:
Yeah. So it’s like a. It’s a semi short form of roundtable camp. The round table, as I mentioned, comes from King Arthur’s Roundtable, something I was so impressed or inspired when I was a college student. And the camp comes from Bar Camp. Many people think it comes from WordCamp. But rtCamp was registered before I knew about WordCamp and RTCAM was not even actually registered as an agency. RTCamp was originally a media company that I intended to build.

Anne Bovelett:
Oh, really? Oh, wow. But this is a wonderful backstory. We’re going to have a good time creating the short description of our talk today. And I also have a question for Aviral.

Rahul Bansal:
Sure.

Anne Bovelett:
Hi, Avril. So you’ve been there since 2021. You’re responsible for marketing now, the way that the company is as a culture. How does that affect the way you do marketing for rtCamp?

Aviral Mittal:
Yeah, that’s a great question. I think I’m so glad that we started with our training program. If you really look at it, we sort of approach our marketing as a training program, but for prospects in a way that, you know, when on the supply side, like we need to have engineers, we need to educate them on how WordPress works, how. How to follow best practices, etc. In the similar way, a lot of our content, a lot of our outreach is around educating people on how WordPress works, how it is the right platform for them, and how we are the right agency for them. And you will be able to see that in small things like, for example, in many cases, we would put out our sample sows or sample contracts or even sample discovery reports, or we would publish detailed guides on migrations from different platforms, what kind of things that they need to take care of. And basically just putting out that content which educates people, helps them build trust in their own time and then reach out to us if they find us the right people to be the right people. So, yeah, I hope that answers.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah, it does. I mean, of course, if you want to explain how marketing is being done for such a big and successful agency, you would need a lot of more time. But this is the base. I think it’s beautiful. Yeah. And I hope we hear much, much more from you in the future and that rtCamp is also becoming more of a household name on this side of the pond. Because like I said, even though you said like 90% of your customers is in the US and the West. Right. I still hear people who don’t know who rtCamp is and what they can do. And I’m always surprised because you are so working on such high class projects with high class companies and being a WordPress VIP agency means a lot. But maybe also a last thing I would like to ask you if people want to approach you or are looking for you to work for them or work with them. What can I tell my friends and what can the listeners tell the people around them about rtCamp so they feel like okay, we want to work with this company.

Rahul Bansal:
Okay, so definitely. So one reason like I first put the reason like we are less known is going back to the introvert Indian cultural route. Like compared to other smaller agencies whose employees are more active on social media and engage in conversations we have less social media footprint, less outspoken people to begin with. But then that never something we aim to solve because fortunately we have been always having high demand like across Covid across all ups and downs the demand has been steady. That being said we have started so we grew organically out of like whatever work. We kept hiring 10, 20 people something like that from last two, three years we put like a conscious effort to grow very fast and that’s where Aviral stepped in played a big role in marketing. So our strength is still engineering. I would say that if people are looking for engineering heavy solutions like migrations, outsourced development, product development, we are good at it. That being said, we are still trying our best to be full service agency by integrating design but we are we mostly work with design partners because so engineering and design are very different in terms of scaling. Like you can put a training program you can have so so engineering scaling engineering shines from doing similar things again and again like following same standard, sticking to same best practices. Design is little bit more freeform, creative something we aim to crack. But overall like our strength has been engineering. And so how to put like if somebody is looking for that consulting heavy company they usually don’t come across rtCamp and that is something we are working hard to change. But while we do that engineering is our like big strength. Like so if anybody has a complex engineering project anything like large scale migration to fixing something that has been like fixing somebody else mess. We shine in those projects.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah that’s really good to know.

Rahul Bansal:
And one more thing we are one more thing we are less known is because we work with a lot of other agencies through subcontracting and in those projects we have strong NDAs where and it works for us so it’s not something we take negatively. Like we give a lot of our engineering force to other agencies. So when the case study they usually land on the other agencies.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah, that’s also good to know. So where can people best find you apart from your website that we of course going to list in the show notes? How do people contact you?

Rahul Bansal:
LinkedIn is very active. Like not me personally, but Aviral and his team is very active on LinkedIn. I think Twitter social media has been very active. Like we have been very active on the social media. We also have a decent listing on Clutch. Like something like if people are. People want some kind of social proof, verified proof before they want to engage us. I think Clutch profile gives us that good visibility into whatever other clients are saying about us.

Anne Bovelett:
Okay, well, I think we’ve already been talking almost like an hour. Time really flies right when a conversation is going smoothly and nice. So Rahul and Aviral, I’m really, really grateful that you found the time to talk to me and it was a wonderful change of topic. I mean of course accessibility we started out with. But to speak about the cultural differences and about your agency, I’ve learned a lot today. I really have to tell you that. And I think our listeners do too. So I’m looking forward to meeting you in person again. And Rahul, are you coming to CloudFest Germany in March? Possibly.

Rahul Bansal:
Most likely, yes. Like we have a product called EasyEngine which is in the server management WordPress hosting management space. We partner with WP Cloud on that. So likely we are. So I will be more likely there. Like I will personally be there. Probably one more rtCamper will be there.

Anne Bovelett:
That’s wonderful to hear. I will be there too, if I can help it. Yeah. And there’s also the hackathon happening before CloudFest. Do you know about it?

Rahul Bansal:
Yeah, I would love to be part of next Hackathon. I will feel like I just don’t know how to get into it.

Anne Bovelett:
Okay, well if you want to get into it, go to hackathon.cloudfest.com and make sure you sign up as soon as possible. It’s an application as an attendee. That would be wonderful to see you. It’s the selection process is also always very heavy on the organizers because like four or 500 people apply, whereas they can only take about 100. But it’s an amazing experience. I’ve been there three times in a row, so I look forward to seeing you there.

Rahul Bansal:
I thought like it’s more for engineers. And, like, I’m less into coding. So that’s why, like, I think I. So when, when you mentioned that site, I opened it right now and then I realized I came across Hackathon, but I didn’t have, like, thinking that you’re supposed to be there as a programmer and.

Anne Bovelett:
No, no, no, no, no, not at all. This is what people, a lot of people think. Of course, we do need a lot of developers, obviously, but it also takes people with experience in building companies, in leading a project, for example, because the things that are being built at the Hackathon are supposed to be projects that don’t die in the water, they have to continue. And in my last project, for example, I had to subdivide into teams. I had people doing the marketing, doing the website. There are people also needing guidance on how to organize a project or how to look at things with a helicopter view. So, yeah, please don’t feel like you don’t belong there if you don’t develop deeply because we definitely need people with management skills and project management skills. And you obviously do have a lot of technical knowledge, right?

Rahul Bansal:
Yeah.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah. So I would be pleased to see you at CloudFest. Of course. I applied myself. I applied with a project, so crossing our fingers. Okay, so let’s close it right now and thank you so, so much for joining me today and I look forward to seeing you soon.

Rahul Bansal:
Thanks, Annie.

Anne Bovelett:
Yeah, thank you too. And I hope you have a wonderful day.

Aviral Mittal:
You too.

Rahul Bansal:
Yes, same to you.

Aviral Mittal:
Bye.

Anne Bovelett:
Bye. Bye.