Naked Startup

Schnitzelconf: Presentations

This one is a bit of an epic, but then so was the amount of useful content from the day. I think I've covered pretty much all of the individual talks, I can make no guarantees as to completeness and obviously will link up any slides if they become available. If you're one of the speakers and you think I've got something wrong or misrepresented you, drop me an email and I'll sort it.

As a sidenote this should be proof that you can indeed type longform articles into an iPad. In cafes and airports.

Paul Campbell

pabcas.com @paulca

Founder of Ketchup, organizer of Funconf "We live in the best of all possible worlds, a world in which the nice guys are winning" Paul opened with an atypical but rousing presidential-style oratory. Rather than try and give a perspective on his product, in its nascent stages, he instead chose to illustrate the hopes, dreams and fears of the new entrprener. I thought the approach was unique and a great start to the day, his optimism at the future was infective.

Update: He's posted a full transcript.

Garrett Dimon

garrentdimon.com @garrettdimon

Founder of Sifter "Bugs are less of a problem, it's a lack of a specific 'required' feature that make support emails mean" Garrett is the solo founder of his startup (with a silent 'money' partner) but as he put it, he was the only one in the trenches when the servers went down. Sifter launched as a side project from his consulting work which ran in parallel for eighteen months until Garrett finally went full time, but he did squeeze in a house move, wedding and honeymoon into that time. Proof that life doesn't have to come second even to your own business!

The (effectively) solo founding has clearly put Garrett through the mill, and his talk had a survivalist edge; emphasizing the support of his family and the need as a solo founder to remain flexible and relaxed in the face of seemingly permanent chaos! As much as you can.

Some interesting points raised:

• Listen to your family, they can normally tell better than you when you need a break
• Try and learn the difference between urgent and important tasks, there is a difference
• Get mobile i.e. Get a laptop and if you can automate tasks so you can do them with a phone
• Set customer expectations, Garrett now explains on his support page that it's just him, and customers seem happy to give him greater slack
• Support is customer feedback, use it
• And most importantly... don't worry, there will be bad days (but not every day) and conversely don't forget to celebrate the good ones!

Goeffrey Grosenbach

blog.peepcode.com @topfunky

Founder (Senior Visionary) of Peep Code "People pay for that?" I'd like to reiterate what was said in Geoff's introduction, it was extremely strange to see Geoff's voice coming out of a human as opposed to a screen, such a huge part of my learning of the last few years has been based on his screencasts.

He opened by explaining that as Peepcode had been asked to sponsor several conferences but this was the first time he'd been asked to speak: leading to his assumption that organizers must have thought he was "rich but dumb". He prefixed his advice by pointing out that business gurus of all sorts proffering advice do not give you all the answers and that his advice was more the sum of many thousands of small decisions. He boiled his approach down to a few small things...

Craftsmanship and Trust

Trust is the asset you bring to your customers, it's what makes economies work. At Peepcode the dedication to quality is what he believes keeps customers coming back.

Find value where others don't see it

Geoff often hears "people pay money for that" when he explains what he does, turns out they do. Often his screencasts may not initially sell very well, like his Intro to git release, but then six months later github launches and it's his best seller ever. He's also recently released an add-on for the Mac text editor Textmate, turns out there's a market for small, very focussed software.

Experimenting with pricing

Geoff offers single unit pricing and packs of 5 & 10 credits at a discount, but over half of his monthly revenue comes from his all-you-can-eat annual subscription. The message here is to find different ways to sell your products.

Solo founder issues

He's still not sure of the answer to the question to "How many employees do you have?" There doesn't seem to be an answer that means 'success' so best not to worry! Being a solo founder does lead to issues, switching between creative and business thinking can be tricky. Best to try to subcontract whatever you can, your time is super valuable.

Creative marketing

Best month ever was a result of a simple email pointing out what was new. He drives traffic through his 'editorially designed' blog, which no other developers have. Sponsoring conferences hasn't been a thing, but giving away product can also work as that costs nothing.

Exercise is important

Often leaving the computer and doing something physical can help the subconscious sift through problems.

Adii Pienaar

adiirockstar.com @adii

Founder of WooThemes "Life happens while people are fixing bugs" Adii came across as more humble (but still very driven) in the flesh than his online 'rockstar' persona might have suggested. Top bloke. He focussed on what he believes makes WooThemes unique: its front to back focus on design.

A lot of his presentation dealt specifically with the balanced 'wide view' you need when operating a design-focussed business. The issues of ego, taste, community critique and the challenge of producing content that is both broad and niche enough to sell to their audience. The difficulty of customizability versus a supportable product.

Another clear message was Adii's attention to detail, WooThemes aim for 'out of the box' awesomeness so their themes work without the user needing to hack at them.

He also touched on the culture of WooThemes, they have several founders and so share the shit work around and are very open with the whole company about what products are working and which ones are not. It's also import to realize you're creating a culture with how you behave, because at some point you have to step away from every decision.

Tom Preston-Warner2>

tom.preston-werner.com @mojombo

Founder of Github and Gravatar (sold to wordpress) "Hire the best people and treat them like kings" "Execution is where ideas die or flourish" Tom opened by declaring that time is our most precious resource, its the one thing we cannot get back.

If you're working at another company you're working on someone else's dream. Don't be fooled by equity as even an early employee, unless you can spot a Google or Facebook (and you can't) the eventual payout will be too small to matter. When you work for yourself you can do 'cool shit' like buy your customers beer or stupid entertaining projects and pick the people you want to work with.

But how? Before you needed money and connections, but now all you need is a MacBook.

The biggest factor in your success is to charge money. To get 100k peer year you only need to make 8,333 per month which is 700 users paying you 12 dollars, suddenly doesn't seem like much right?

Github has approximately 370k users and over a million repos. They got there by having a product that is viral and by building a community. Let your users share their stuff with their friends and let them become your sales team, then let them get involved with each other without your involvement. It's about helping your users kick ass .

Think about how your users can give you cash, for example think about a companies product, they will pay you forever. Think about add ons, like the github jobs board, that let you leverage your community (250 jobs x $300 is a lot of money for a three week project!)

Cofounders are the most important thing as they prevent dumb decisions and help you look at stuff with different eyes. Join user groups, then drink beer: camaraderie makes life better. Your team are your product, hire the best and treat them like kings, at github the developers get the same salary as the founders.

Github's approach to getting bigger is to continue to go through the process of innovating, executing and iterating.

Innovate

The very beginning of a feature, identify the interesting side trail

Execute

Where ideas go to flourish or die. Good execution results in an iPhone level of polish: you have to care. You're trying to get to a state where the the comments are "of course it looks like that"

Iterate

Keep doing it. You always get a second chance at a feature Make things real, Github have a ship it squirrel they use in their company campfire room.

If you do all these things you'll never 'work' again.

Tobi Lütke

blog.leetsoft.com @tobi

Founder of Shopify "Fuck the better mousetrap" "Your paycheck is society's scorecard" Tobi's Shopify is probably the biggest company of any of the speakers and has probably been going the longest as well. His talk focussed on the finances and metrics you need to track to understand the state of your business.

Firstly, charge real money (spotting a theme yet?) as freemium is bullshit. Turns out the ideas in Chris Anderson's Long Tail are pretty much nonsense, even Amazon have semi-debunked his theories. It doesn't work out, certainly in Tobi's experience.

Then raise your money until people complain, a good technique is simply to put an expiry date on your prices. You want to get to the level of 'expensive, but worth it'. A good example of that level of pricing is wine, a high-end wine merchant will know a lot more about pricing than any number of startup founders!

You also have to help your customers to think what you want them to think! A classic Steve Jobs move, create your own reality distortion field, create social proof. Simply by adding most popular to one of Shopify's plans on its pricing page made it into the most popular!

Build and know your funnel: Visitors -> Leads -> Prospects -> Customers. Optimize it at every stage. You need a sales team, even if it's just your website and adwords. Track the stats to improve your funnel.

He also covered the various simple metrics you should be measuring... I didn't scribble down the details, but the obvious source for the same formulae is Dave McClure's Startup Metrics for Pirates.

Peldi Guilizzoni

peldi.com @peldi @balsamiq

Founder of Balsamiq Mockups "It's my second child... but a monster that needs six people to look after it." "It's hard to make friends with Google Analytics" He talked through his experience of Balsamiq's success which still seems to slightly baffle him given the velocity his business has taken in the last two years. The presentation took the form of a flow chart and can be found at bit.ly/cotoletta I can't really add much that his slides don't say but I'll illuminate a couple of points.

He recommends actually taking the time to get good at something, do your 10,000 hours to become an expert and when you start hearing stuff like 'when you become rich and famous don't forget me', its a good sign! Also have a business plan, even if it turns out to be nonsense (his did) it'll help convince you to make the jump.

As you're going through the process try and remember why you're doing it, family are important and so is trying to do what you love. For Peldi life is a little sadder without coding, so he's trying to get to place where he can do tasks that take more than 10 minutes.

He also directed to his own startup marketing advice.

Michael Buffington

collusioni.st @go

Founder of Grasshopper Labs (behind Grasshopper, Chargify & Spreadable)

"You don't need to be a WalMart in the world" Michael's keynote at the end of the day was amusing and his crazy animated keynote slides are something to behold.

His argument was that as a world we need purpose-driven entrepreneurial behavior because the giant corporate behemoths aren't going to change things for the better. He also included a small rant about how the education system fails to create or reward entrepreneurial traits or even encourage the very thing society values, art, culture, writing etc.

Stay small. It can be a good life to be small.

Ignore VC - funding sucks - all that happens is you waste time pitching the lie, wasting time and losing control when you should be making something amazing.

Keep your job, it's not a safety net its a trampoline.

You need to ask yourself the questions: What are you doing this for? If it's for money you're probably going to be disappointed. What will keep you going? What would you do with infinite money? How long could you be idle? When would your toys and riches lose their appeal?

Find that thing and do it.

Both inspirational and challenging, a great finish. Time to get back to work on Gameplan and Today's News.