Naked Startup

Looking Back, Looking Forward

So, only a few days into the new year and I'm already late writing this.

2010 was frankly a brilliant year for Arun & myself. We launched stuff, and we saw that it was good. Looking back at our heady 9 week sprint to take Gameplan from nothing to product was super productive. Now it may not have been the soaraway success we had hoped for, but it does what it says it does and technically is probably the proudest I've ever been of anything.

The future of Gameplan lies in a 'pivot' (ugh, dreadful startup cliche ahoy!) we need to work out a better way of attracting users, in short we built something useful for people who don't know they need it.

We also built our first (and Arun's second) iOS app, Today's News a Guardian iPhone App. We subsequently launched a major improvement, a version for iPhone as well as iPad and implementing Apple's iAds. Today's News is as much an experiment as it is a money making venture (just as well given the performance of banner ads!) but we have thousands of users every day who find the app as useful as I personally do. So that's awesome.

We finished the year taking on a contracting role at ViKi, working alongside the development team there and a micro-army of Pivots. It's been good to broaden our pairing partners and simply by working with a talented group of people on the rewrite of a high traffic site has been enlightening. We also launched with little to no problem and after ironing out some minor bugs (only to be expected!) over the first two weeks we have an average response time of under 150ms and that's not even including pages served from the high-speed cache.

If I'm allowed I may write in more detail about what we're using at ViKi, if not I can probably just write a bit more generically about the tools we've used in the process, without incurring the wrath of any NDAs!

The next year holds many excitements. We have a few more weeks at ViKi, I'm doing some interesting consulting work with Paul G and we may have a big announcement in the next few weeks about our future plans. Oh plus there's going to be a Ruby Conference in April in Singapore with top international speakers, you'll want to come.

Seedcamp Singapore 2010 Retrospective and Distilling Reality

So Andy and I were accepted into a mini-Seedcamp in Singapore last week. We were apprehensive that it might turn out to be an echo chamber of familiar faces and generic advice, but Seedcamp turned out to be an excellent exercise in questioning our assumptions and challenging the direction of our product as well as our business model.

The Pitch The day began with all companies pitching their ideas to a roomful of fellow Seedcampers as well as mentors. Andy gave a very good pitch and many of the mentors later commented that the Gameplan pitch was quite memorable and that they were intrigued by the idea and wanted to speak to us about the product as well as our business model.

You can watch the entire presentation here.

The Mentorship Sessions The pitching session was then followed by mentorship sessions which can be best described as 'speed-dating-meets-advisors'. We were paired with BitDin and shared 15-20 minutes of time with multiple sets of mentors over the course of the day. Reshma and Philipp explained that this is to maximize the number of ideas that you can absorb, the number of introductions or connections that you can get, and most of all - exercise your brain and think outside the box. Here are a few highlights:

Daniel Heaf (BBC Worldwide) and Yeo Yaw Shin (Infocomm Investments Pte Ltd) Our first session set the tone for the rest of the day. Both Dan and Yaw asked pointed questions about Gameplan - what it does, what our target market is, how do we plan to market it, etc. and it gave us the chance to clarify our pitch and our message and ensure that we made sense while speaking to veterans of the Internet industry.

There was discussion about engaging schools as users of Gameplan but Dan pointed out that schools are tough to involve as early adopters (he was speaking from experience). Dan also sowed the first seeds of the Gameplan pivot, when he said that for a consumer Internet company, it is easier to go with a bottom-up approach rather than our top-down approach.

In other words, if we are targeting leagues, then the initial set of users that we need to get on board are not the league managers but the players. Given our struggles with marketing and early adoption we also asked Dan about how we figure out when to 'pivot'. Moral of the story: give it a bash, get critical mass, but if you don't have measurable traction - think of changing course.

We also got to demo Today's News and if we weren't mistaken, there was some definite excitement over what we're about to launch.

Adrian Blunt and Chieh Suang (Nusantara Ventures) Our next session was with Adrian Blunt and Chieh Suang from Nusantara Ventures - an early stage venture capital firm focusing on investments in Indonesia. Adrian also used to be the program manager for FIFA Online, and as enthusiastic FIFA players, it was a mini-thrill for both of us to meet him.

They both recommended various avenues to persue for exposure - from advertising on sports/news sites or blogs, to running our own leagues to spread awareness (we came pretty close to the second suggestion with our sponsorship of The Startup Cup).

Philippe Cazaubon (Data Robotics, Inc. - makers of the incredible Drobo) My favourite takeaway from this session was how Philippe, as soon as he sat down, asked us this question: "How do you make money and who do you make money for?" I personally think it's a brilliant question and one every startup should attempt to answer before it sets out to do business. This led to another engaging session about getting traction, speaking to various kinds of people who would generate leads for us as well as more introductions in the bag.

Remember: "How do you make money and who do you make money for?"

Christian Geissendoerfer (Yoose.com) and Edvarcl Heng (Mediacom and SocialHero.me) This was by far the most eye-opening session for us. We've never really spoken to a 'pure' marketing person regarding Gameplan prior to this, so Edvarcl really had us thinking when his first words were: "Make it free". He went on to provide us with a fairly convincing alternative course, focussing on the players and then our business model primarily becomes lead-generation for major sports brands such as Adidas, Nike, Puma et al. He cited examples of DailyMile, Endomondo and Runkeeper of how they kept their primary app free but became a vast resource for huge sports brands to tap into.

In the six months we've started, we'd become somewhat wedded to the idea of a pay business focused on revenues and profits - so to listen to this perspective was fascinating (as well as a little scary).

Christian also offered to introduce us to a German sports league he knows of - the number of introductions and leads we got from Seedcamp is outstanding.

Aarti Gumaledar (Yahoo) and Philipp Moehring (Seedcamp) Aarti and Philipp took up where we left off and further strengthened the case for a product that is free at the point of use. Aarti also brought up the angle (very Yahoo-esque I might add) of how Gameplan could become an excellent source of hyper-local sports data if we made it free and focused on a bottoms-up approach. Philipp further shook us up when he asked us "Who our target market is?" and dismissed our generic answer and poked us to come up with a much sleeker, cleaner message.

At the end of the day, though very tired, Andy and I felt very good about our decision to apply for Seedcamp. Even though some of the mentors had very little knowledge of how sport works (or sometimes even of how consumer Internet companies work!). Not to forget, our hearty congratulations to the winners and we hope you guys have a great time at Seedcamp London.

It was incredibly valuable to remain sponges for the entire day, ask questions, be questioned and most of all have a lot of fun. But as a friend of ours Dinesh mentioned later in the week, it's important not to get carried away by new ideas and thinking different. What's important for success is for us to distill our own reality from the advice and not accept or implement ideas wholesale.

We've spent a fair amount of time discussing the future path of Gameplan between us (and with anyone who'll listen!) whilst also polishing Today's News and starting a few little freelance jobs. In the next couple of weeks we'll get back into Gameplan proper with what will probably be a new direction, but we're letting the Seedcamp-sparked ideas seep through our subconscious until then.

For those on the fence about applying to Seedcamp, we wholeheartedly recommend it!

SingTel Accelerate 2010 – Day Two

I perceived about a 50% drop off in attendance for the second day. It's often a problem with conferences, I really think a focussed single day is often a better event. People have real work to do or other commitments so turning up to two full days can be a bit of an ask and I think the extended 'adverts' at the beginning of the first day weakened some resolve for the second.

This is my write up of day two's presentations at the SingTel Accelerate 2010 conference. There is also an overview and the first day's content.

Mitchell Baker

blog.lizardwrangler.com @mitchellbaker

Chair of Mozilla Foundation This was perhaps a little dry, but then in that unforgiving hanger it was very hard to build any rapport with the audience, I get the sense she even prefers presenting in a more collaborative environment! Mitchell talked through how Mozilla had used it's open and chaotic nature to compete and improve the open web.

Things feel like they're speeding up even compared to a year ago. How do we build value in this setting? Mozilla use openness, participatory, decentralization, flexibility, and tries to make it easy to try things out and to develop structures that promote these attributes.

Internet, blogosphere is all distributed, using these models. Mozilla is focussed right on the extreme of these models, due to it's civic, nonprofit status. Open source for the public benefit, over 400m users. Mozilla invests in the web as a platform for technology innovation. They don't see the improvements to IE as a problem, the improvements to to web, in general, are the goal. The competition in the browser market is a great thing for improving what we can do with the web.

Mozilla need to be open to compete, as their competition is much bigger. The ground underneath them is changing and they can't keep track, so need to be open. In 2004 they were 15 people and are now 300 but still over 50% of patches are from volunteers.

Make it easy to try. It's important to realise that secrets feel safe, but are not cost free, sometimes outside eyes can help. Policy is also important, how much negotiation do you have to do before you can do something?

Open innovation, not one size fits all. Certainly requires commitment as the hardships is that it's tough to fail in public. However it gives great flexibility and you can benefit from others innovation.

An open world is part order and part chaos, the key is to balance the two.

Rob Goldberg

VP of Business Operations at Zynga People are spending huge amounts of time on social networks. Combined with the app economy & virtual goods there is a gaming industry revolution going on. Social gaming is a $15b industry. Online games grew 7% in the last few years but Facebook/social gaming grew 300%.

Taps into human needs. Social communication through shared experiences, the network is the substrate beneath the game.

A social game is a fun and easy to play, three minute, guilty pleasure. Not WoW, MW2 or other online gaming. The basic gameplay is free, to get broad adoption. Between half and three percent of users buy virtual goods, to enhance the gameplay.

The key is that they are universally themed and played with real friends. Generates authentic social interactions creating real social communications. Everybody wins.

Why does it matter?

Consumer

• 321m installs, people you know are playing!
• Real communications are happening, families playing together to make connections. The game provides a mechanism to grease the wheels of communication and add a little fun.
• Provides self expression. Could it be the new email, chat room or IM?

Mobile Operator

• Social Gaming is the leading application use on mobile.
• Consumers find apps through carriers and they prefer to pay through the carrier for convenience and security.
• Drive data plan adoption, smart phone adoption and there is a revenue share.

Consumer website or business

• Time spent is huge, can be an hour a day.
• Games drive engagement, don't think about producing a game for my brand. How does the game crossover with your brand? Would you make a movie or newspaper for your brand? Games are the same.
• Ads, branded virtual goods, in game integration.

Hong Qu

@hqu

Designer at YouTube YouTube would try and work out who their users were and created personas to guide their engineering. They stayed close to the customers, listen to support emails. Everyone got a weekly email of site stats (the second appearance for this at the conference). Also a sense of ownership amongst the staff, no QA - everyone tested, everyone fixed.

Think like a game designer. Formulate strategy at a systemic level, work out how users interact, work out their motivations and patterns of behavior. Throw engineers at the stuff users are actually using! Don't get bogged down in develping non-performing features. Simplify. Release minor fixes every week, major features every month and full redesign once a year.

Why do user research? The later you collect it the cost of change is higher. Tough to change paths once a direction is set. Like google with google video.

You have to be careful with A/B testing, it can turn into an arms race between competing goals. Know what you're trying to achieve. Causality is better, work out why people are doing things. Multivariate testing is even better.

Localization was important for the continued growth once YouTube was bought by Google. Marketing message for local markets was prospect of global success not just local.

Michael Galpert

michaelgalpert.com @msg

Founder of Aviary Michael's speech had a lot of 'cool shit' in his presentation, but there seemed very little to link it all together other than it was 'cool shit'. And once again the massive room did it's damage.

He made some interesting points about incentivizing innovation, like the X Prize or the Netflix prize. He also discussed allowing people freedom to try things, citing Google's infamous 20% time that produced GMail.

Richard Kelly

on ideo.com

Associate Partner at Ideo Shanghai Once again a talk full of interesting stuff that didn't seem to fully hang together for me, but I think that was more to do with the videos (that didn't quite gel) than the content, which did have more of a message.

He posited that design is everywhere: having design as just cool or pretty is missing the point. Designers solve problems in different ways. He contrasted the difference between choosing (analytical thinking) and creating (design thinking).

Designers diverge to create choices, and IDEO allows and encourages that. You have to focus on people. You can't start with business models or technology. You have to understand your customers unique point of view.

A useful technique at IDEO is prototyping. Build to think. Don't come to a meeting without one. Make things really simple, what can we build to answer the questions we have? Prototypes enable a better conversation.

The second message of the talk was that IDEO is clearly a super-awesome place to work. :-)

Noah Kagan

okdork.com @noahkagan

Founder of AppSumo Probably the most entertaining talk of the day and although he'd struggled (MC'ing) in the big room like all the speakers, in a more intimate setting he was able to work his charm on the crowd.

Deliberately provocative in content there were many little vignettes of 'stuff' that encouraged the crowd to do something a bit unusual.

The structure was loosely his career journey from (literally) sleeping on the job at Intel, through getting fired at Facebook, marketing success at mint.com and then his current project AppSumo.

Consider alternative ways of pricing. Freemium, deep discount, virtual goods, service pricing.

Outsourcing is the norm, Noah uses a virtual freelancer in Bulgaria and he earns more than his parents. It works, but it's not so much about the money, it's about the value of your own time. Reconsider how you spend both.

But then look at how you spend time in your business. On AppSumo support is actually a high ROI activity, because he learns what his customers are looking for.

Marketing has changed. People can complain in public which is both cool and shit at the same time. Social recommendation is better than a link.

Lean startups are just common sense. You don't have to spend the two years to get to validation! 9 months before the launch of mint.com and they knew it was going to be a success when they launched due to the marketing activities they were doing before the site launched.

Chaos is your friend. Try lots of stuff. Explore new things.

Do four things tomorrow...

1. Call your customer. 2. Cancel a meeting. 5-10 minutes every morning seems to be effective 3. Find a thing taking too long and improve it. 4. Go for a walk, focus on the best use of your time.

And try to get fired! It's extremely humbling.

Two great things to try and live your life by: Jeff Bezos' Regret Minimization Framework (4 mins) and Steve Jobs' Harvard commencement speech (15 mins). NB: Only twenty minutes of video and I would really recommend them if you haven't seen them

Panel - Investments in South East Asia

Joi Ito @joi,
Andy Zain @andyzain,
Prof Wong Poh Kam @pohkam,
Edgar Hardless.
Moderator: Darius Cheung @rius

NB: I have paraphrased people's comments here, get in touch if you'd like me to correct anything that you feel is a misrepresentation. Probably the most interesting panel, given the excellent moderation by Darius, of McAfee (nee Tencube). He wasn't afraid to ask searching questions of the panelists and put them on the spot. Plus Joi is always very quotable!

Straight out of the gate Darius quizzed Joi about comments in his BBC World Service interview that seemed to indicate that his passions lay in Dubai (where he lives) and Tokyo (where many of his business interests are) and that Singapore was a handy stop off on his preferred airline!

He responded that he'd 'tried' Singapore 12-13 years ago, but at that time it was hard to make progress. He admitted that investments in Singapore were not something he looked for and they did make him a nice offer but the government make it very easy for the private sector to get involved if its something they see as needed for the country.

Why Singapore? Singapore could be anywhere, but isn't. You do not need to be in Silicon Valley, you can create a hub for this sort of innovation with a friendly government and a decent Internet connection. However it needs critical mass, which is why he's making a lot of noise, need to get to a tipping point. Didn't notice from outside how nice it is!

He also made it clear that on his investments in Singapore, he can take a lot more risk because of the government help. The 'swings of the bat' are even cheaper for him. Outside Singapore he'd have to know the entrepreneur, be the first investor and for them to have a product and already have scalable distribution plan. In his more typical investments you can't pitch ideas, with just slides, without a working product, but in Singapore he's more willing and able to try early.

As an investor you have to add enough value that they would want to hire you.

The top level of government in SG is very agile compared to governments elsewhere but the average SG student wants to simply know the answer to the test. Entrepreneurs have to question authority.

Difficult to give general advice to entrepreneurs. What attracted Joi back was a group of civil service people that were allowed to be unique inside the bureaucracy.

Are there any common qualities in entreprenuers in which he's invested? Not really, they are all very different characters. You have to spend a lot of time with these guys and like them more. Good intuition. Some VCs invest in assholes, some VCs are assholes, but I have a no asshole rule. Humble but confident. Give advice but they have the final choice. Co investors are more often the people who screwed him!

There seems to be a high quality of entrepreneurs in Singapore, but Joi can't tell if Neoteny Labs have met them all yet! Investors in Asia often are less savvy than the entrepreneurs which is tricky as they have to provide more advice when the money is smaller.

Ed Hardless (also interviewed by e27) was also on the panel and gave a much better account of the Innov8 fund than had been provided in the midst of the first day's messages from the sponsor.

Innovation is important to Asian companies, more recognition. Next five years an exciting time. Singtel think they can help with going to market.

What would make them invest? A focus on mobile: the next 1 billion users will be accessing the Internet on mobile.

Singtel know the pain points in the telecoms industry in SE Asia - sourced information from their group companies. Taking that information and identifying companies who can identify and help those pain points. If they invest in a company the company can be sure that someone in the Singtel group will be a market for them!

They are not looking for control from day one. Influencing companies for preferred terms is not really in the interests of the fund.

There were also some good 'Why Indonesia?' points made by Andy Zain.

The four large Asian markets are somewhat closed for governmental or other regions. Indonesia has a latin alphabet and a large enough single country market to be a good big stepping stone to other larger markets like the Philippines. It does have unique infrastructure problems but that provides opportunities. For example the telcos can be tricky to deal with and take a big cut. Mig33 managed to get around this by having their own merchant system.

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Well if you've made it through all this you've done well, there's also my overview and my take on day one. Don't forget to checkout our products, Gameplan and Today's News.

SingTel Accelerate 2010 – Day One

I'm only going to cover a few takeaways for the speeches I saw and with four tracks I was only able see a small part of what was going on. I'm not a massive fan of these huge multi-track conferences, for me it's better to have much more focussed events that are less spread out and allow plenty of time for meeting people.

This is my write up of day one's presentations at the SingTel Accelerate 2010 conference. There is also an overview and the second day's content.

Joi Ito

joi.ito.com @joi

General Partner of Neoteny Labs I've seen the presentation before, but its always good to see an excellent speaker at work. Given his warmup act it was a triumph and at last we were into the content proper.

Rob Mee

CEO of Pivotal Labs Now I know the Singapore Pivotal guys and am pretty on board with how they do things programming-wise so Rob's talk on 'turning software development on its head' already had me in the metaphorical choir.

His use of various biological, chemical and physical processes as metaphor for the way Pivotal work may not have been entirely scientifically accurate but was an interesting way of presenting their philosophy and process.

However when it comes down to it, the strongest argument for pairing, testing etc is the experience of trying it and seeing how well it works. Until you do that you'll be doomed to suffer the mythology of the wizard / cowboy / lone wolf programmer.

He also put up a 'No innovation required' slide, which had him chased from the venue by SingTel representatives. (Not actually true).

The questions threw up some interesting details about the Pivotal process: they do 8 weeks in person before attempting any virtual pairing and the pivotal office is a fully open space, raucous but focussed!

Bill Scott

Sales & Business Development at Getjar Boasting of one billion non-apple app downloads, and a interesting look at the apps-on-mobile space this was a level-headed assessment of the state of the mobile arena for developers.

He clarified that we're now in an age of touch not type. Apple changed the game. The Internet browser is analogous to the early DOS days. Touch devices are replacing the 'typing' style with touching icons like the point and click days. All this means that apps are big business... likely over 30 billion in 5 years, that's an industry of 200,000 people.

Selling apps is not the best model. Selling 99c apps is not a billion dollar business. Freemium services are a good choice as are supplemental purchases.

He also gave a quick personal overview of the various platforms:

Android: Per user minimization is climbing. Carriers are driving android into lower end phones, which should increase the market hugely. iPhone: Good today, but will not scale like Android as Apple are not interested in the mass market. Windows: Not sure they can make the closed store work but has good game strength due to Xbox experience. Blackberry: Have to do something dramatic to get out of their niche. Symbian: Declining. Meego could work, but wont happen without a US presence in the handset market. WebOS: Best technology and a limited interest in a closed app strategy. Not sure what HP have planned for mobile. Java: Not gonna happen. Oracle might try, but they seem uninterested.

He also suggested an excellent multi-platform development pattern: don't forget the web. Start with one platform, then create a web version before building out native formats. Obviously a little plug for GetJar, but it's a good suggestion!

Amit Ranjan

amitranjan.com @amitranjan

Co-founder & COO at Slideshare Slideshare is 3 founders, 30 staff and Indian flavored! Most of their development is with Amit in India, their head office is in the US. He shared some findings from his years at Slideshare.

The organization matters more than idea, market, competition. Products is the art of visualizing the invisible. It's about the people and the attitude. He made the anaology with Darwin's Theory of Evolution: the organism that is the most able to change is the most successful.

Speed now, scale later. Make the product and let scalability be a new problem if you get lucky. Use your small size to retain agility. First width, then depth. Make your user base as wide and quickly as possible. Mould your virality into the product.

Data and metrics are the lifeblood of the organization. These are hard but not sexy: track your funnels, where you customers come from. Trends are important, more so than absolute numbers. A key takeaway is to abandon 'sexy dashboards' send email reports, it works wonders.

East vs west.

It's key to understand the differences in culture and use them, he illustrated with these illustrations from Yang Liu.

Outsource your non-core competency. A lot of technical complexity is outsourced at Slideshare. When you take aim, think bullseye and nothing else - no distractions. That is what allows you to compete with the big boys. Focus on your users and not your competition. It forces you to think and you avoid playing catchup.

James Chan

motochan.com @motochan

Invetment Manager at Neoteny Labs Good talk, slides available on his blog. As I commented on his post, James leapt straight into the 'meat' of the presentation and pulled out a few 'gotchas' to be aware of but an even simpler explanation would have helped ground the presentation for those who did not understand the lingo!

Neoteny's profile is small teams, at an early stage. Money raising can be tough, and it's difficult to balance product and company and VC. You are often raising money when you need it most, but have the least experience.

When pitching it helps to think big. 'Engineer honesty' isn't useful, the dream is! This is an investor's philosophy, you're not overselling. The trust between investor and entrepreneur is paramount - it's about economics and control.

A term sheet is not a binding agreement, so wordsmiths are not welcome but the essence is important. Price per share is the most important thing. Worrying about pre- or post- valuations is not the point.

Good lawyers are hard to find. If you find one keep them close! Manage them well or they can manage you.

The most important thing about taking investment is that it is not about selling half the pie, its about using the investor's money to massively increase the size of the pie for all investors.

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There's also my overview and my take on day two. Don't forget to checkout our products, Gameplan and Today's News.

SingTel Accelerate 2010 – Overview

This is the first of three articles about the recent Accelerate 2010 conference. We got some last minute tickets from James Chan [@motochan] of Neoteny Labs, one of the sponsors (who incidentally have a new website courtesy of my own fair hand).

My first contact was an SMS thanking me for going to i.lluminate, SingTel's more typical 'business' conference from the previous day. I was a little worried that this might be a sign of haplessness to come. In fact infrastructure was not something that faltered at all and the numbers of employed personnel/cameramen left it clear that this was not an exercise in frugality.

First impressions? Holy crap. A massive room, that felt empty despite a couple of thousand people, you had to feel for Noah Kagan [@noahkagan] who was MC'ing, an early morning Singapore crowd isn't participatory at the best of times, but given how sparsely populated the aircraft hanger was they'd have had to have laced the coffee with hallucinogenics.

Then a slightly incongruous drumming band, who were pretty good but the accompanying video animation seemed to fire app missiles from all over Asia into Singapore causing an explosion! I think it was a good explosion though. :-)

The Ads

I'm not going to dwell on the hour and a half that followed and seemed to stretch into infinity. The SingTel CEO had the unfortunate moment where he told the crowd that "Einstein tried a thousand times before he invented the lightbulb", which he'd have had to have emerged from the womb holding in 1879 when it was invented and he was born.

We were then told often by several members of SingTel senior management how innovation and creativity were important and that SingTel had them in spades before doing a interminable demo of their new (terrible) TV product that was so awful that it probably deserves it's own article.

The classic 'scared of being a dumb pipe' message of every telco in the world rang out through all of SingTel's speeches. Thankfully it appears they are willing to buy their way out of their 'predicament'! The SingTel Innov8 investment fund was launched last week and we were told that as entrepreneurs it was "another area which you can deal with SingTel, simply".

Again I'm pleased that there is this money available for startups in the South East Asian market, but I can't help but feel that it's more a case that SingTel can use it's huge reach to scale later in a startup's lifecycle rather than help foster the initial push to product.

I'll leave my gripes with SingTel as an article for another time, but it's safe to say SingTel's spoken view of itself and the actual experience of dealing with them in the real world are entirely different.

We also heard from Ronnie Tay, the CEO of iDA. Clearly a very bright chap although suffering from a bad case of buzzword-itis. As I put it on twitter... "Drinking game for #accel2010. Everytime a speaker says innovation, cloud or creativity drink a shot. Hammered in 5 minutes."

There was some good news in the government's understanding that fast network access acts as an enabler to innovative businesses. (Wireless@SG for it's faults is better than everywhere else) And that they want the engineering workforce to have relevant skills. Once again I just wish my experience on the ground trying to get involved with the universities was more fruitful.

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There's also my take on day one's presentations and also day two. Don't forget to checkout our products, Gameplan and Today's News.

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.

Schnitzelconf: An Overview

I would normally throw something like this up on my personal blog, but the Schnitzelconf ethos is very much how Arun and I think about Gameplan.

I'm going to say it now, rather than save it for the end: Schnitzelconf was the best conference I have ever been to, bar none. The speakers were all terrific, the narrow focus of the conference and panels was a triumph and it all ended with eating chilli in the shadow of dinosaur skeletons (thanks to the amazing venue of the natural history museum).

So firstly congratulations to Amy, Thomas, Harald and Alex. Epic shit. I've got a couple of further articles to come on the individual talks and the panels so this is simply the 'around the conference' post rather than details of the individual sessions.

Firstly it was great that this was in Vienna with a European focus, apart from the embarrassment of my appalling German contrasted with the excellent English of every European I met. Most of the other conferences I'm aware of in the UK and Europe are about more narrow technical subjects (web design, Rails etc) so a more general 'small business with a web focus' conference with a strong build-a-fucking-product-and-charge-for-it message was more enlightening for me.

I'm not aware of any other conferences with such a strong opinionated message, I guess the only spiritual sibling might be lessconf in the US. So many web conferences are driven by a VC/be-the-next-Twitter vibe that to be reminded that outside money is a) not the only way and b) is most likely not even a good idea for most people, was intensely refreshing. This is particularly true when you consider the funding (and subsequent behavior) of startups that haven't even got half a product, let alone any income.

A couple of meta-observations of all the featured businesses:

High quality design and attention to detail were the hallmarks of the successful businesses of the speakers, reconfirming my belief that a beautiful/usable product is a must.

There was also a high focus on the exceptional treatment of customers and high levels of support, another hallmark of all of the speakers businesses.

Also rather obviously, CHARGE MONEY FOR YOUR PRODUCT.

One of the most interesting observations was in conversation with Alex Hillman who noted that for a web conference we hadn't heard the word 'startup' much, rather the word 'business' seemed a better fit.

The high quality (and accessibility) of the speakers, given the low ratio of speakers to attendees, was a tremendous boon. It's always great to be able to meet people you respect and realize that despite their success, they have come from a standing start as well.

So I return to the UK, and then sunny Singapore, reinvigorated and more convinced that the track we're on with Gameplan (and our other projects) is the right one. In fact I think a version of this conference for Singapore itself might be a good thing given the burgeoning web scene, to perhaps suggest another way than the Gahmen grant or Gahmen-backed finance routes.