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[Event Recap] 2nd Freelancers Meetup + WPKitchen’s 2nd Anniversary
All HD photos, full-length video, and reel: https://u.pcloud.link/publink/show?code=kZy4vg5ZQhRiRvtKzYVLt24RyGhYCFCudUak
After hosting our first meetup, we realized the second would be a bigger test. It wasn’t just another event, because it coincided with WPKitchen’s second anniversary, expectations were naturally higher.
The challenges involved securing additional sponsors, selecting an appropriate venue, finalizing the dinner menu, arranging a cost-effective event shoot, planning a freelancing activity, inviting a chief guest, and strong administrative coordination.
To address these challenges in detail, the three meet time hosts met on Sunday, 12 October 2025, at a private guest house, where we discussed everything over warm soup and chicken nihari.
After identifying every challenge and dividing our workload, our first mission was to secure a local sponsor. Naturally, the first person we thought of was Adeel Javaid, one of WPKitchen’s earliest supporters. On Tuesday, 14 October 2025, my co-host Sohail and I visited his office to explore sponsorship opportunities for our second freelancers’ meetup.
Adeel Javaid’s acceptance as the chief guest, along with his sponsorship, gave us our first real win and encouraged us to keep pushing forward.
As discussed in our hosts’ meeting, we decided to launch a limited sponsorship round called the Fantastic Four, offering clear visibility and meaningful impact for each partner. Our first sponsor was Career Institute, but to cover all event expenses, we needed three more sponsors. So we sat at home and in offices again and began searching for partners for our upcoming meetup. After twenty days of quiet effort and dedicated hard work from the hosts, we finally received not just good news, but truly great news.
We were super excited to hear that Jetpack by Automattic agreed to sponsor our second self-funded freelancers’ meetup, cheering us on as we celebrated WPKitchen’s second anniversary with a curated dinner for around 30 to 50 freelancers, entrepreneurs, and WordPress professionals in Faisalabad on Sunday, November 16, 2025.
This milestone carries emotions deeper than words can express. It is not just our success; it belongs to every freelancer who believed in us.
Read the full blog post about this win here 👉 https://wpkitchen.com/?p=6937
Jetpack’s sponsorship made many things easier for us, and we finally took a deep breath. On November 6, we were back on the road to meet our second potential local sponsor and the planned second chief guest for the event. We met Rehan Mushtaq, partner at Space Hub, a co-working space, with over 24 years of experience in software and product leadership. As a Fractional CTO and AI & Digital Transformation Consultant, he helps startups scale and innovate through the strategic use of technology and AI. We discussed the upcoming freelancers’ meetup and the future direction of the F3 community.
Unfortunately, Rehan Sb was not available on the date of our event. We hope he will join us at our next meetup.
We were glad to have Muhammad Tayyab (CEO, WebAnchor.net) join us as the second chief guest. We learned a lot from his life and business experiences during the event.
We also visited the venue Quilim Restaurant and confirmed the booking for the second freelancers’ meetup.
Guess what? Our third fantastic sponsor was EWWW Image Optimizer — incredibly generous and supporting us since day one. How could we possibly forget to display their name at the venue?
Overall, we reached 75% of our sponsorship goal. We secured three fantastic sponsors out of our target of four. It’s a great start, and we look forward to doing even better at the next meetup.
With a 75% success rate, the hosts met again on 9th November and decided to move the event from 15th November to 16th, as the 16th was closer to our anniversary date. Since some freelancers still work on Saturdays, we chose Sunday for the dinner event so they could take care of their daytime responsibilities and join us freely in the evening.
But we weren’t done yet. We still had to decide how to welcome our guests, arrange seating, start participant introductions, distribute giveaways, and place the customized WPKitchen cake. We also planned where to arrange sweets, since birthdays and anniversaries are always closely associated with them. Additionally, we decided how participants would recognize the hosts. To solve this, we planned to create event badge cards that clearly distinguished each host and their responsibilities.
Finally, this is how we (hosts), the hosts, appeared at the meetup.
The Real Challenge
Most of the time, when we reached out to people and companies for potential sponsorship for WPKitchen’s anniversary, those who were not involved with WordPress were a bit concerned about why they should invest in or support another company’s celebration. Many of them said that if we had an independent community, they would be interested in partnering.
After a lot of discussion, we decided to create F3 — Freelancers from Faisalabad, an independent and neutral community platform designed to connect, support, and empower local freelancers across all skill levels.
WPKitchen will invite freelancers from the F3 community to its meetups. We can even organize Laravel, AI, Drupal, or other tech events under the F3 banner. And if events are happening in our city, we can send a delegation from F3.
We proudly announced F3 during our second meetup, and registrations are now open at f3.org.pk.
Call for Sponsors:
We are now accepting sponsorships for our third freelancers’ meetup, scheduled to be held in mid-December 2025.
All in all, on 16th November 2025, the event began and concluded gracefully. Enjoy the highlights below:
All photos, videos, and reel: https://u.pcloud.link/publink/show?code=kZy4vg5ZQhRiRvtKzYVLt24RyGhYCFCudUak