The Business of Software Conference (Part 1)
On my way back from the Business of Software Conference in Boston. I debated hard about coming to this one, not because I didn't think it would be good, it was just an inconvenient date. I am so glad that I went though. I left with so many ideas.
There really was a large cross section of attendees, from small startups (like me) to large, established companies. Because of that there was really a wide range of topics. Not all of them were applicable to my situation but enough were to make it well worth it.
Seth Godin started off the conference with a great presentation on marketing. I have seen/read quite a bit of his stuff before but he always gets you thinking about new ways to reach out to people. We have been struggling with some marketing decisions lately and his presentation really helped me realize where we need to focus our efforts.
Next was Jason Fried from 37Signals. I had pretty much seen this presentation before online but it was still valuable. Jason obviously has some strong opinions. My only suggestion for the presentation would be that he start out by stating that a lot of the principles he espouses are only possible if you have a certain type of business model. He talks about avoiding feature creep and maintaining a 4-day workweek. But, if you are selling single license software you have to implement new features in order to sell upgrades. And, if you are a consulting company who bills hourly you may or may not be able to take Fridays off. I guess that the real message is that you need to move your business model to a SaaS structure, then you can do a lot of the things that he talks about.
All that being said, he has a lot of good points and listening to him always makes me think about how we can simplify things. Our product, ScreenSteps was developed right after reading their book, Getting Real.
Eric Sink was next with a comparison of a product manager to a parent. In some ways it was geared towards a company that is larger than we are but there was still quite a bit of good information there. The basic idea was to imagine your product as a child. At different stages of its development it will need different things.
After lunch (which was quite good) came the Pecha Kucha presentations. In case you don't know Pecha Kucha means (at least at this conference) that each presenter gets to go through 20 slides in 20 seconds. The slides advance automatically so it can be a bit tricky. Some did better than others but there was actually quite a bit of good information here. My favorites were:
- Jason Cohen who had some great marketing ideas.
- Lou Franco who had some great insights into how to use funneling techniques outside of your website, and
- Alexis Ohanian was flat out hilarious with with Web 2.0 parody.
That is all I have for now. I will post more about the conference later.
The Business of Software Conference (Part 2)
I decided that trying to go through every presentation was going to be more than I was capable of. So, to finish off my review of the conference, I am just going to talk about the presenters that were most pertinent to me an my business at our current stage of development. That is not to say that the presenters I don't mention were bad, it is just that their topics weren't directly applicable to my situation.
Day 1 (Continued)
The overall highlight of the conference for me was Dharmesh Shah from OnStartups.com and the founder of HubSpot. The guy is brilliant. It was clear he didn't have a set presentation but instead just some guidelines that he meandered through. It was all fascinating.
A lot of the presentation had to do with metrics. How much does it cost to acquire a customer? How much is that customer worth once you have acquired them? What is the typical lifespan of a customer? To all of these questions my answer was a solid, "I have no idea" so obviously I have some work to do.
He also talked about the Customer Happiness Index (CHI). The basic idea is to measure actions that tell you how much a customer is using your product and figure out what actions are likely to prompt them to upgrade or cancel your service. By doing this you can develop some very good financial projections and hopefully see what is/isn't working before it is too late turn that information into useful actions. Once again, we aren't doing much in this area so it is something that we want to start looking at right away.
Another great tip was to test the advertising of the product using Adwords before you develop/launch it. A little too late for our current product, but something to keep in mind for future ventures.
Another one I really liked was Jessica Livingston, author of "Founders At Work". In the book she interviews a bunch of founders. I read it last year and it was one of the best books on entrepreneurism I have ever read. The stories were all fascinating and contained the types of anecdotes that every founder craves. She mentioned that she might start looking at founders who weren't successful, maybe a book titled "Founders Who Failed" (my term, not hers)? I hope she does something along those lines. Information about failed startups would probably be more valuable than the stories of the successes. It is great hear about those who won the battle, but sometimes you want to talk to the guys who found the mines before your cross the field.
Finishing of the first day was Paul Kenny from Ocean Learning. He is a sales consultant from the UK. A lot of what he talked about was similar to stuff I had read in Jeff Thull's book "Exceptional Selling". He had some great tips but it all boiled down to, "Care about your customer and do what is best for them." If your solution isn't the right thing for them, tell them so. It will build credibility for the future. Don't talk to them about what your product does. See if you can sell them solutions to their problems. Great stuff that I really already know but don't always practice. He mentioned that there is a salesman in the UK that is quite a bit older than him but still comes to his conference twice a year. The guy says it is to keep his skills fresh because it is so easy to slip into bad habits. So true.
Day 2
Day 2 had more presentations that weren't directly applicable to our business right than day 1, but there was still some excellent stuff in there.
Tom Jennings from Summit Partners gave a great rundown of how venture capitalists work with founders and how they make money. He seemed like a very straight shooter and probably a great guy to do business with. I learned a ton. Don't know if I will ever be in the position to take venture funding but, if I am, I will definitely refer back to a lot of what he said.
Key takeaways for me were: