Episode 141 – Rachel Makool

Introducing Rachel Makool

Rachel is a senior community manager at GoDaddy and has been there for five years, managing the online community and other community programs. She’s been a community professional for over 15 years. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and loves to hike, travel, and she’s a collector of many things. She also sells odds and ends online and has done so for 20 years.

Show Notes

Twitter | @rachelmakool

LinkedIn | RachelMakool

LinkedIn OpenWeStand Small Business Community

Learn and share in the GoDaddy Community

Preferred Pronouns | She/Her

Episode Transcript

Tara: This is Hallway Chats, where we meet people who use WordPress.

Liam: We ask questions and our guests share their stories, ideas, and perspectives.

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is Episode 141.

Liam: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Liam Dempsey.

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today we’re joined by Rachel Makool. Rachel is a senior community manager at GoDaddy and has been there for five years, managing the online community and other community programs. She’s been a community professional for over 15 years. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and loves to hike, travel, and she’s a collector of many things. She also sells odds and ends online and has done so for 20 years. Welcome, Rachel. Really glad to see you here today.

Rachel: Hey, you guys. Really, really happy to be here with you.

Liam: Oh, it’s a delight to have you here. Thanks for joining us. Rachel, can you tell us a little bit more about yourself, please?

Rachel: Yeah. I’ve had a really interesting career path to share with you. I was in one career and then I got into marketing, and then that transitioned into this community profession that I’m in. It’s really been quite a journey for me. I have to say that I’m personally passionate about what I do. I just really love interacting with customers and people and believe that community is such a driver of business and learning and engaging conversation, and a great way to get to know others.

Tara: I have appreciated getting to know you in the GoDaddy community, and can sense that that is something that you’re passionate about and really good at. Tell me a little bit about this community idea or this community profession. Because it’s something that I feel is well-known in our WordPress community, because we are a community, but I’ve never really otherwise heard about it as a thing. You’ve done this at other places, I assume. How long has that been a thing? Talk a little bit more about what that’s about and how prevalent it is or isn’t.

Rachel: Well, I’m going to date myself here, you guys. I was at eBay the early days of eBay. I joined the company in the year 2000. That was really the start of kind of online communities—people getting together. Obviously, eBay was a new way for people to sell stuff online. People were learning together, and just grew this really powerful and impactful community where people would get to know each other, they’d shared challenges that they were having. Somebody else would try something, and they would share what they tried. It was amazing. And it grew really fast, and it was super inspirational.

That really led to us doing a lot of things of trying to get people connected together. One of the things that we found was a lot of our customers were solopreneurs. They were by themselves, they were working out of their homes,