My First Dot Com Pho with John Chow and Yaro Starak

Today I had the pleasure of attending my very first Dot Com Pho. What’s a Dot Com Pho? Dot Com Pho is a weekly event organized locally here in Vancouver, BC by professional Blogger John Chow of JohnChow.com. It is basically a weekly lunch meeting on Saturday where you can meet John Chow and some of the regular Dot Com Pho attendees.

I’ve been meaning to make it out to Dot Com Pho for weeks now but it’s been really tough to arrange my schedule to make the time to go on Saturday afternoons. After putting it off for weeks I decided to go this week. This week was a bit special too because it’s John’s last Dot Com Pho for a while as he’s leaving for a trip to Asia until mid June and one of my favorite Blogger’s who I have learned so much from – Yaro Starak – was in town from Australia so I really wanted to go and meet them both. Not only that, but John was also giving away free pens, so how could I miss it?!

It was a record crowd of 25 people this time, beating the last record of 16 people. It must have been all the free pens John was giving away. Too bad half way through Dot Com Pho we discovered that none of the pens worked! Oh well, at least Ed Lau got to make a funny parody of an infomercial for the non-working pens.

The food was good and came out really fast especially for a group of our size which was really surprising. I ordered grilled chicken skewers on vermicelli noodles with a spring roll. It seemed like a safe bet since I’m not much into tripe, beef tendons or beef balls like John (refer to video).

One thing I was kicking myself for was the fact that I didn’t have any business cards to give out. Everything that I’ve done to promote my Blog so far has all been online so I haven’t seen the need for business cards yet, but I’m definitely going to have to get some printed for networking events like this.

As I mentioned earlier, Yaro Starak of Entrepreneurs-Journey.com was in town from Australia and it was great to finally meet him in person. I have been a reader of Yaro’s Blog for a long time and a student of his Blog Mastermind mentorship program since about October of last year. It’s funny because I’ve seen video of Yaro, extensive audio recordings of his voice in the program, pictures and of course all the Blogging he does on his site so I kind of felt like I’ve known the guy for months. When I met him today in person he was pretty much exactly like he is on his Blog and videos. He’s a super friendly guy who I could totally tell has a genuine hear to help people out.

Since we were sitting at a long table with Yaro sitting quite a ways down we didn’t get to chat for too long, but he did come by half way through and said hello and had a quick chat with us. He was more than willing to offer inspiration and some Blogging tips to my younger brother Bart, my good friend Jabeel and a few others sitting at our end of the table. His free eBook “Blog Profits BluePrint” pretty much covers exactly what you need to do to make money Blogging, but it’s always fun to talk to someone in person. I managed to snap a few pictures from the event and as always John did up a video from the event which you can see below.

Me on the left and my brother Bart on the right, with the rest of the attendees at the table. Yes, we had the whole table all the way to the back of the restaurant. (picture above)

Yaro with his world-famous hair on the left and myself on the right. (picture above)

My brother Bart on the left and my good friend Jabeel on the right. (picture above)

That’s me on the left and John “I’ll Make You Look Short” Chow on the right. Holy smokes he’s tall. Just for reference I’m 5’10″ so it’s not like I’m super short or anything. (picture above)

My brother Bart on the left, John Chow in the middle and Jabeel on the right. (picture above)

Below is the video that John shot at Dot Com Pho just to give you an idea of the laid back and fun atmosphere you can expect at the event.

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