Episodes

Show Notes

• MicroConf 2012
• Pictures from MicroConf
• Montabe (provided the picture slideshow app)
• WildBit (sponsored Monday night’s party)
• WP Engine (Jason Cohen’s Company)
• Balsamiq (Peldi’s Company)
• Software Promotions (Dave Collins’ Company)
• Woothemes (Adii’s Company)
• Eliza Brock Software (sponsored the little red notebooks)

Transcript

[00:00] Mike: This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 80.

[00:02] [music]

[00:10] Mike: Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products, whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it.  I’m Mike.

[00:18] Rob: And I’m Rob.

[00:19] Mike: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. How are you doing this week, Rob? Are you getting sleep?

[00:24] Rob: I am getting so much sleep now that MicroConf is done. It feels good. I had a really tough time sleeping the night before and the two nights of even the night after, you know, you and I were up till probably 3 in the morning with that band of what, maybe 20, 20 folks you stock around that late. I went upstairs and I was thinking “Oh, I’m going to sleep till noon. No kids, no flight till 4 pm and sure enough I’d woke up like, kind of like anxiety where in that like 8 in the morning.

[00:48] Mike: Yeah. When I got there Saturday night, the next day I slept I got nine hours of sleep I think and then for the next three nights I got around 4 and half to 5 hours of sleep each night. [Laughter]

[00:59] Rob: Totally worth it, man. I had a blast.

[01:02] Mike: Yeah. What was your favorite part?

[01:03] Rob: I really enjoyed connecting again with people who we’ve seen last year as well as meeting a bunch of people who I’ve already met through the Micropreneur Academy who have called and e-mailed us through the podcast, comment on the blog, bought the book and e-mailed me. I mean, there’s all these ways that I meet people virtually and then finally meet them face to face, it’s really cool. This is like the original reason I think we started talking about putting MicroConf on period is that we have this kind of network around the world of people we wanted to connect with and there was really no event where we can all get together and so our excuse for doing that is getting really good speakers and putting us all in a room for three days.

[01:41] And so my favorite parts were, you know, the breaks and hanging out in the evening and just hearing what people are up to, giving feedback, getting advice, I mean I, you know, pitch some ideas to a bunch of people just to get thoughts on, on how I should move forward and I think my biggest takeaway is I’ve come back way more motivated like I had just had been attacking my list specifically a lot of stuff on HitTail because I got some comments and feedback and thoughts and both from speakers, you know, Jason Cohen and Hiten Shah and those guys as well as just, you know, all the attendees. There were a lot of really knowledgeable attendees this year. That was cool. How about you? What was your favorite part?

[02:15] Mike: I really like just talking to everyone who was there. I mean, there were a lot of people there who had just never been there. I mean, what do we have? Probably 50 people or so from last year but because we grew the conference by so much, it was a much smaller percentage of the people that were there but yeah, just talking with everybody, getting ideas, feedback from things that I’m working on and talking to them about things that they’re working on.

[02:38] I sat one night, I think it was the last night we were there and Patrick Foley and I just sat there and hashed out what the problems would like he has this idea for our products and I walked him through it and talked to him a lot about it and I was like that doesn’t really solve our problem from me and I didn’t get it for a long time and then suddenly things started to click for us and I was like “Well, that could solve this problem that I have, you know, could just kind of organized in the conference everything.” And he, you know, one of the things it was talked about was, you know, marry the problem not the solution so he was kind of thinking a lot about the thing he wanted to build versus the problems that it would be solving for people and I’m like, well, you know, this is the problem I have and he said “Yeah, I can do that.”

[03:18] It was really great to talk to people about the problems that you’re having and then frame them for them or help them out in any way that we could. I mean, I connected on so many people like somebody said “Oh, I’m having a problem with this.” I’m like “You should talk to so and so …” It was just in all these conversations that I had with people. I was just connecting people left and right. That was really cool.

[03:37] Rob: Yeah. I have to admit I enjoyed that. It’s kind of like having your whole network or at least like the best of the best of your network there in person. But it really was, all right? Like people would ask you questions. It’s like I don’t know the answer but this guy totally does like he’s also doing mobile apps right now. Have you met Patrick from Inkstone Software, you know, it’s just that great feeling of like knowing enough people that we could really help them out [0:04:00] as well as being help to ourselves like I ask a lot of folks about their thoughts on a bunch of… on a whole slew of topics and it was cool.

[04:06] Experts, man. I mean, seriously there were — I didn’t even realized there were attendees there who were founders of, like the guy from YouNeedABudget.com, there were like 17 person, 20 person software startup and he was just an attendee and I had no idea and he introduced himself, that was awesome. I mean, there were – and there’s a guy named Sameer from ProProfs.com –

[04:24] Mike: Yup.

[04:25] Rob: … who again, I had never met, hadn’t heard of and he, I mean, their company’s doing really well. He’s explaining to me how many millions of visits they get a month. I mean, there were some, you know, really cool attendees and there were some, you know, really high end people in attendance as well as all the people, I mean, so many people we know from the academy, the academy who have like awesome businesses that you know, totally support them and, you know, they’ve left their jobs because of. And I’ve actually realized that’s something we don’t do enough and I think we might want to start on the podcast or either bringing them on or at least mentioning them.

[04:54] I had forgotten how many people in the academy have actually, I mean, I basically lost track and as I start to meet them I was like “Oh yeah. Antonin Hildebrand from TotalFinder.com. I totally [Laughter] – I remember you but I kind of forgotten that.” It’s success story like he did never product when he join the academy and then he launched it and he totally quit his job and he’s like travelling the world now.

[05:15] And there’s a lot of those people and so I think that it was a reminder of like yeah, you know, we need to be better about kind of bringing, bringing those stories to light because I think they’re inspirational.

[05:25] Mike: Yeah. I was surprised that a sheer number of people from the academy that were there. I brought one of those little stamps and I had the guys at the – who were working at the front desk every time somebody would come up to register just asking if they were an academy member, we stamped in their name tags so that you and I could identify who the academy members were but also say can identify each other. Kind of connect people together to some degree and I was just oddly shock in the number of people who were there who are also in the academy.

[05:55] Rob: I agree. By the way, that was genius [Laughter] to do that because I was keeping my eye at the whole time but yeah, how many, I mean, there were 164, 165 people including speakers, sponsors, attendees, I mean the whole deal. My guess is there were 30 to 40 Micropreneur Academy members —

[06:12] Mike: Probably.

[06:13] Rob: You think there were that many?

[06:14] Mike: I —

[06:14] Rob: Yeah. I mean, I saw a lot of, lot of the smiley face stickers.

[06:17] [music]

[06:20] Rob: So today we are going to be covering basically going through MicroConf 2012. We’re going to talk about some of our favorite moments, favorite speakers, just, you know, different stories that came out of it. Do you have anything else you want to cover before we dive in?

[06:33] Mike: I probably talk about AuditShark a little bit. I talked about AuditShark to a bunch of people who were there and kind of got some good feedback on future directions for it, so …

[06:42] Rob: But I thought it was cool because A, you were doing customer development basically on the spot, right? You were asking some folks and then B, at the very end of the conference as it was closing before their kind of last party you basically said like if anyone’s interested in the service that does this like come up and talk to me and you said like I’m thinking about pivoting AuditShark to this but I want to hear about it.

[07:02] So, that was – that’s like the perfect example of what you should come to the conference with. It’s something like that, right? Because you’re going to get a ton of value at a very quickly and that’s something that’s hard to do virtually or harder to do virtually than it was to just do in person.

[07:14] Mike: Yup. And I actually got commitments from people to have pay for it.

[07:17] Rob: That’s cool. So wait, we’ll cover that —

[07:19] Mike: Next time. [Laughter]

[07:20] Rob: … in Episode 81, yup. We’re talking about 2013 although of course as usual I haven’t decided that I’m actually going to do at 2013 conference. We – we already have 156 people on the e-mail list, the early bird list for next year which —

[07:33] Mike: That’s the crew and squad if you say no and then get —

[07:35] Rob: Yeah, I know.

[07:36] Mike: I’ll tweet out the address. [Laughter]

[07:38] Rob: I’m going to get hurt. Yeah. So, but last year we only had I think 250 e-mails throughout the whole year and now, we now already have 150 and it’s only a couple of weeks after, so it was obviously, obviously doing something right. I think the Twitter stream was a lot – lot hotter this year as well, seemed like if we’re picking in on it.

[07:55] Mike: That 150 number or 156 number kind of scares me though for next year because it’s like what do we do to —

[08:02] Rob: I know.

[08:03] Mike: … maintain the quality, I mean, I – I had at least half a dozen of people come up to me in just various times and say “Hey, this is the best conference I’ve ever been to. “ And I’ve been, you know, one guy made a point to say “And I’ve been to a lot.”

[08:16] Rob: Right.

[08:17] Mike: And somebody else said he’s been, you know, 25, 30 conferences and he said that the MicroConf is by far the best. In a way it’s kind of scary because it’s like okay, we’ll now … How do we tap this next year or can we tap it or, you know, —

[08:28] Rob: Right.

[08:29] Mike: … can we at least meet expectations.

[08:31] Rob: Right. I think, well I think there’s a couple of things that are going on in my head. I think one thing is that we take what we learn from this year because we changed a bunch of things from last year, right? We had two more tear downs, we had shorter talks, we had longer breaks and I felt like all that went well and then moving forward. I think next year we may want to have one or two panels, shorter panels that are done well. I think we may want to consider having fewer speakers and longer breaks. I think we may want to have let the audience do some short talks, like do some 15-minute talks, 10 or 15-minute talks because there were a lot of very knowledgeable people who I think could lend inside but who may, you know, who aren’t like tap your big names speakers or whatever they know but they have a lot of knowledge in there, in their domain.

[09:11] And so I think there’s, there’s ways that we can continue to kind of keep it varied hopefully without diluting it, right? Because you don’t want to go so far work just like all panels, all workshops and it just kind of not – it’s not as valuable. I think the other thing is we need to be pretty consistent about — if you attended this year, we kind of need to let you know first and let you in first because I do, I mean, it sold out in two and a half weeks this year. My guess is since we’re talking about not growing it, not making it larger that we’re going to sell out in that time or shorter next year. And so I do think that previous attendee should kind of get some priority.

[09:46] I mean, I talked to a lot of people about whether we should grow the conference another 40 or 50 people or whether we should raise the price a hundred bucks and there’s a bunch of things we can do like we want to make the conference better but we need a coordinator to do that. We need – we should need more resources to do it and [0:10:00] moving to the Hard Rock this year was a lot more expensive than it was last year and so, you know, if we raised the price to hundred bucks which basically became the just of what everyone who I talked to one-on-one told me, that they would prefer to just pay a little more and keep the conference small and keep the quality of the — of the attendees high was a big concern.

[10:17] Mike: One person e-mailed me and said that they’d be okay with adding another 40 or 50 people so long as it was, you know, the same type of crowd.

[10:27] Rob: Yeah. And that’s – I just don’t know how can you guarantee that. We get a certain number of thousand bucks, 1500 bucks and then it’s like that were a bunch of enterprise people start coming in and you’re going to start getting, you know, C level folks from Oracle and Microsoft not that that’s bad but it just not what we would, that’s not the conference we want to throw.

[10:42] Mike: Right.

[10:43] Rob: So hey, let’s pop in to day one and just look at maybe your favorite speaker or two, what you took away and that kind of stuff to give listeners an idea. Day 1 was – it was Jason Cohen from A Smart Bear, Hiten Shah who found the KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg. And then we did some website tear downs and then I spoke and Peldi did an “Ask me anything” and then you spoke and then the last was Dan Martell who a lot of people may not have heard of but probably one of the most inspirational if not the most inspirational talk in my opinion. So of those folks what – who do you like best? What did you takeaway?

[11:21] Mike: Well, I’ve heard Jason Cohen talk about – he talks about honesty and I heard that talk at the Business of Software and I liked it again, I mean, it’s not like a lot of stuff changed from, you know, when he gave it there. But it still resonates. I mean, it’s still a great talk and it’s still great and great topic. The other one I liked was – I like Peldi’s just because it was very free form. It was very different than a lot of them and Peldi is just entertaining, I mean, he’s great to listen to, great to talk to and has a way of portraying things or putting things at in a ways off-the-cuff but it seems like he’s thought it through in his head. I don’t know how he comes up with some of the stuff that he does but it’s – it always seems like he’s thought it through and maybe he hasn’t. Maybe he just thrown it out there as ideas but I really like his as well.

[12:05] Rob: And for the listeners, Peldi did “Ask me anything” so he had 45 minutes and it was purely Q&A. He didn’t do a presentation. He put up some topics and people got to ask him anything about it. So, he’s businesses, I mean, it’s growing. He’s with eleven people now and so he has a lot of experience going from basically a single founder all the way up, up to where he is now, multi-million dollars in revenue.

[12:24] Mike: Yup.

[12:25] Rob: Well cool. Yeah, I really enjoy it. So I’m very pleased we had Jason Cohen go first. I think he kicked off the conference. I just don’t know if there could have been a better speaker in that slot, you know, he kicked it off with the honesty thing and it really kind of resonated through all the talks I thought and a lot of people who I talked to said he has was one of the most compelling talk. It wasn’t a ton of takeaways. It wasn’t like here’s how to market your business but it was just a way of thinking about kind of running your business and being really honest with kind of with everything you say and that that’s actually better for your bottom line. He tries to prove it through a series of a stories and stats and all that stuff, definitely enjoyed it again.

[13:03] And that’s why we had asked him to come there, right? I mean, we had seen his talk and wanted him to come and share with the gang at MicroConf. I really like Hiten’s. I was like I like what he has to say but —

[13:13] Mike: Yeah. That was the – that was the other one that I really like as well was Hiten’s.

[13:15] Rob: And he of course had a bunch of stuff, I mean, he’s grown KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg. One was venture founded, one is bootstrapped and he’s just done, you know, really well with both of them and so tons of knowledge. We did have videos taken of all the talks and our current plan is to release them inside the Micropreneur Academy to Micropreneur Academy members, so it’ll be – we’ll probably release like one a month as they come out. And then, you know, we don’t have plans beyond that at this point.

[13:43] My other favorite talk and the one I heard a lot about when I ask people was Dan Martell’s. And his is about again, not a ton of actionable stuff but it was really, it was inspirational –

[13:53] Mike: Yeah.

[13:53] Rob: He had this anecdote about his brother who was basically going bankrupt, trying to be a homebuilder. It was customer development as what it was with [0:14:00] homebuilding. He realized that like women typically make the decision when buying a home. If a couple is buying a home, the woman typically makes a decision and so he got a bunch of women, got them together and took them out to all these homes and asked them “What do you like best about it?” And basically the designed the best home based on the opinions of these women and just has it amazing homebuilding business now because of this customer development approach.

[14:25] Mike: Yeah, I mean, one of the examples that he threw out was his brother. He went in to go see his brother and his brother’s house was virtually empty and he went in, you know, there’s no couch, no carpets, no lamps, no, nothing. And he goes in and asked his brother if he got robbed and his brother said “Well, these houses, I was told that these houses display better if they are furnished and I don’t want to go buy furniture so I took all of my furniture out of my house and put in, you know, just the display house” which is getting things done that need to get done in whatever way you possibly can.

[14:56] Rob: Hey, so how did you feel during your talk and after? Did you get any feedback? What are your thoughts? How did you feel overall?

[15:02] Mike: My talk?

[15:04] Rob: Uh huh. Yeah.

[15:05] Mike: It resonated for some people. I don’t know. I didn’t get a huge amount of feedback. I have seen a couple of people who have tweeted out things here and there. One of the conference goers put out a blog article and have us written through it. It was really funny. He said that Mike had what was surely the best “I’m an entrepreneur but I’m also a computer science geek” moment of the conference. [Laughter]

[15:27] Rob: Nice. Yeah. You had the coolest Scott Adams quote. It was –

[15:31] Mike: Losers –

[15:32] Rob: Losers have goals, winners have systems.

[15:34] Mike: Yup.

[15:34] Rob: Is that right?

[15:34] Mike: Uh huh.

[15:34] Rob: Yeah. That was a good quote. I saw that on Twitter several times after you talked.

[15:39: Mike: Yeah, so that was the legist of my talk and for the people who weren’t there, I mean, I basically talked about being able to pipeline the processes that are in your business and relating it to how a processor does things and being able to pipeline that stuff so you can get more things done faster and not lose work that you’ve done and the idea that you really have to position yourself as a builder of processes in your business not necessarily the person who is executing them.

[16:07] And honestly like when you’re building a software product, it’s the exact same thing. You’re building a process and you’re letting something else to execute it and not something else as the computer.

[16:15] Rob: So, I thought the tear downs went pretty well like we had thrown them together kind of last minute last year and it felt like a nice break to me. For the listeners tear down is basically the audience just starts calling out website so you’ll just call out your website and whoever’s up there, the first day it was Jason Cohen from A Smart Bear and the second day it was Dave Collins from Software Promotions and Patrick McKenzie from Bingo Card Creator and his blog and they just basically look at it and they give their advice on things you should test basically it’s like your button should be bigger, the copy is off and I don’t understand what that saying. Here’s maybe you could rewrite it like this, they kind of click through it and it’s just as really interesting. Public, evaluation of your site and, you know, people call out their URL and they just sit there and just scribble down notes like crazy.

[17:00] And I even saw people approaching like Jason Cohen after his talk and after the conference saying, “Hey, could you do a quick tear down of mine?” And then he would run through theirs in two or three minutes, you know, just one-on-one.

[17:10] Mike: Yeah. I think those tear downs are definitely a must have at the conference from now on. They are nice changer pace and they definitely break up the day. What did you think about your talk? Did you get any feedback on it?

[17:22] Rob: You know, I didn’t get much feedback which tells me it was probably one of the last memorable talks of the conference. I think we had such – we had such an amazing group of speakers and I’m not just saying that because we put the conference together but it really was the conference that you and I wanted to attend, right? That’s what we’re building here, is every conference I have felt like “Oh, you know, this speaker or that or that part of the schedule just didn’t work or whatever.” And we’re trying to do it exactly how we want and obviously that’s resonating, you know, within a people that it’s working but I think I’m a pretty good writer now. I think you and I do a good podcast. I think I’m a good entrepreneur. I think my public speaking is actually maybe one of my lesser abilities.

[18:02] Mike: Your speaking is pretty good. [Laughter] I would say it’s better than mine.

[18:05] Rob: Oh, well, thanks. I appreciate that.

[18:07] Mike: I think what you’re probably seeing is that I got this a little bit as well, people didn’t necessarily want to come up and talk to me too much about my talk or other things that were going on. They just didn’t want to bug me because they could probably see that I was busy and there were lots of stuff going on, I mean, we got a conference to manage.

[18:23] Rob: You know, Mike, I hope that’s the case. I didn’t really think about it. I just — normally when I speak afterwards like a lot of people approach me and we talk about the stuff and then for the rest of the conference I went up talking to people about the contents of the talk and that didn’t happened a single time of MicroConf and so maybe you’re right. Maybe it was just the people were giving us, you know, leeway so to speak or more concerned about giving us feedback on the conference rather than the actual talks that we were giving.

[18:48] Mike: Yeah. I mean, some of the feedback that I got was more – I don’t want to say it was in passing but it was like the hallway thing like “Hey, I really like your talk. It resonated with me and, you know, I really –

[18:57] Rob: Got it.

[18:58] Mike: … like this and that.” I didn’t get a lot of feedback right away but then at the very end of the conference, I mean, somebody went – I think you were up there asking what people had gotten out of it, you know, the first two things that were called out were both from my talk. It was –

[19:11] Rob: Yup.

[19:11] Mike: … marketing Monday concept and then the other one was building processes instead of setting goals.

[19:16] Rob: Yup.

[19:17] Mike: But –

[19:17] Rob: No, I thought that was really cool.

[19:18] Mike: I didn’t get a lot of feedback during the conference. I really think it’s just because people wanted us to focus on having a great conference as oppose to talking with — specifically what our talk was but I can totally see how, you know, you might be a little concern about it because I mean, I even have my concerns about getting up there and talking because you’ve got all these great speakers and it’s a little intimidating, I mean, I was looking at the conference, you know, the line up of the speakers and I’m like, you know, usually you want to go just after somebody who might or might not be so good or, you know, kind of average and I’m looking at the speaker line up saying “Man, there’s no good place to go.” [Laughter]

[19:53] Rob: Yeah. Yeah. I was before Peldi and basically after Hiten Shah and you’re after Peldi and before Dan Martell.

[19:59] Mike: Right.

[20:00] Rob: Like that’s brutal.

[20:01] Mike: Uh huh.

[20:02] Mike: But I’m –

[20:02] Rob: Yeah.

[20:02] Mike: … there from other speakers too though, you know, like —

[20:04] Rob: Yeah.

[20:04] Mike: … I’d say probably we close to half of the speakers. Basically said it’s an intimidating line up to speak in because everyone, you know, they all look up to each other. So …

[20:14] Rob: Right. That was the cool part is like at the speakers dinner. So we have the speakers dinner Sunday night and you get these people together and they — they either all know each other or they know of each other and they really wanted to meet one another.

[20:24] Mike: Right.

[20:25] Rob: And so you’re basically getting this really talented group of folks together and the conversations are just riveting. And that’s actually, oh next year, I think we want to do a — we only did a 2-hour speaker dinner. I think we want to do a 3-hour speaker dinner because I felt like I had to bail too early and that we — that we can sat there for another hour easily.

[20:42] Mike: Uh huh.

[20:43] Rob: What did you think — we get on the day two in a second but I wanted to get your thoughts on like our giveaways. We had a couple of candles, we had a candle fire and then we had a couple lifetime memberships to the academy, we had software from sponsors. In general, how do you feel like all that went?

[20:57] Mike: It went smoother than I thought it would to be perfectly honest. And I think a lot of that had to do with switching from — last year, I just drew numbers and had everybody — I had a number put on the back of everybody’s badge. So everybody had to look at it. And this year, I just drew names out of a box and that —

[21:15] Rob: That was better.

[21:15] Mike: … was so much easier. I was surprised at how well the Swingline stapler went over. [Laughter]

[21:20] Rob: Yes, you had a red Swingline, right?

[21:22] Mike: Yeah.

[21:22] Rob: From Office Space?

[21:24] Mike: Yup.

[21:24] Rob: People were so — that was the runner-up prize that you — the last thing given out was the XBox with connect, the XBox 360 with connect. Then the runner-up prize was the red Swingline. That was really cool.

[21:33] Mike: Yup. People loved that. So hey, what do you think about the party over at Rumor on Monday night?

[21:40] Rob: Definitely, yeah. WildBit sponsor this party, definitely higher class than we’ve ever done, you know, our MicroConf stuff is a — it’s always good and solid but we typically are like, “All right, come to a bar and have some drinks.” But they had orders. It was out on a patio. It was really a nice, nice venue. I was happy that we were there. And in fact, if we stay at Hard Rock, if we do it at the Hard Rock again next year, I would want to inquire and find out about the venue again because I just — it was nice through its outdoors.

[22:06] Mike: Uh huh.

[22:06] Rob: Yeah, it was 8 degrees until 10 at night which was nice. And it was just good to be outside for a while, right and not be inside casinos the whole time —

[22:14] Mike: Yeah, it was definitely — it was definitely nice to not hear the cha-ching from [Laughter] from the slot machines —

[22:20] Rob: Yup.

[22:20] Mike: … all night along.

[22:21] Rob: Now at the Hard Rock actually, I never heard it because of the music. It was kind of cool to have a soundtrack playing of, well, just good music from the last 30 years.

[0:22:28] Mike: Uh huh.

[22:28] Rob: Did you notice that? Like it was — they have the slot machines from way, way down and the music was turned off because that’s their vibe, you know?

[22:35] Mike: I didn’t notice.

[22:37] Rob: Yup.

[22:37] Mike: I was too busy, you know, doing other things. I did —

[22:39] Rob: I was too busy putting on a call.

[22:40] Mike: [Laughter] What were you doing?

[22:43] Rob: I think overwhelmingly people were like, yes, better venue, right? We did the Riviera last year which was an older hotel. Hard Rock’s newer or hipper. It’s just — it was nicer. Do you think in terms of about the feedback you got and your impression of what we want to do next year, do we want to — do you think you — would you go back to the Hard Rock? Would you look at a similar hotel, you know, in Vegas about the same level? Or do you think we should move up? What do you think?

[23:03] Mike: I would say the same level is fine. I would have, you know, definitely, consider going back to the Hard Rock and the fact that Rumor was right across the street was definitely a plus. I got some feedback from people that they said that it was — they liked that it was off the strip a little bit.

[23:17] Rob: How interesting, okay.

[23:18] Mike: Uh huh. So —

[23:20] Rob: I think for some folks, some folks had never been to Vegas and they want a block in to the strip because they obviously, you know, you need to see it if you never been but I had not thought about that though because we were secluded and that’s probably a good thing —

[23:30] Mike: Uh huh.

[23:30] Rob: … because people didn’t tend to wander off, right? We did tend to stay close and kind of stay as a group and do a lot of chatting. Is that — was that the implication that people were saying since it was off the strip, it was less distracting?

[23:40] Mike: Yeah, that was part of it I think. I think it was just the fact that it wasn’t — because on the strip things tend to be a little bit, I’ll say over the top, I guess. And it didn’t seem like that at the Hard Rock at all. So I will definitely —

[23:51] Rob: Right.

[23:52] Mike: … go back there. I think the only downside that I saw was getting across the street to Rumor was actually a little bit of a pain in the neck. [Laughter]

[0:24:00] Rob: It was like a game of Frogger.

[24:01] Mike: It was. It was something —

[24:02] Rob: Right? [Laughter]

[24:02] Mike: … like Frogger.

[24:04] Rob: I did like that it’s like a $12 cab ride from the airport instead of a $25 cab ride like the north end of the strip is.

[24:09] Mike: Or a $40 if, you know, if they ask you if you want to take the highway and you say yes and they get off the south side and then all the way around. [Laughter]

[24:15] Rob: Awesome. That’s a trick question. Let’s talk about day two of the conference. So it was the WildBit sponsor the party at Rumor which is just — it was a boutique hotel across the street. So then day two, who were your favorites and most memorable?

[24:29] Mike: I mean I like them all. Patrick’s got a way with words, I mean way with his stories and you know, it’s hard to discount any of those. I mean because they’re both entertaining and educational at the same time. I mean everybody had great things to say. I learned a lot from listening to Dave talked about Google AdWords.

[24:46] Rob: Right. So that’s Dave Collins from Software Promotions. He’s been doing Pay Per Click stuff for ten years I think he said. Yeah, it’s a long —

[24:52] Mike: Something like that. He added up the hours on screen and amounted out to something like 11,000 hours —

[24:59] Rob: That’s right.

[24:59] Mike: … that he spent working in Google AdWords. And he had some really interesting insights that I guess I hadn’t considered before and honestly, it makes me think that, oh, maybe I’ll go back and give AdWords a try because I’ve honestly, you know, avoided going in to Google AdWords just because it’s not that I don’t understand it really, it’s more that I don’t have the time to dedicate to it. It’s not like I can sit there on top of the campaigns that I’m running and manage them and pay attention to them a lot and part of it is just not knowing how everything all fits together but the other side of it is I just don’t have the time and I wonder if using some of the techniques and things that he talked about would make it a little bit easier for me.

[25:39] Rob: Right. Well, that was the other thing he said that you should spend one to one and a half hours, maybe it’s one to two hours a week managing your AdWords and I had never done even if when I was working from it and spend not much time. So that’s an interesting, kind of an interesting mind set shift that if I want to run a successful campaign these days, that’s probably where you need to be.

[25:57] Mike: Uh huh.

[25:58] Rob: It just occurred to me we have not mentioned MicroConfPics.com. If people go there, there’s a picture slideshow and it was basically any picture that was tweeted with a hash tag MicroConf is added to that slideshow. And that was provided for us by Chris at Montabe, montabe.com and he’s a Micropreneur Academy member and he has this product called Montabe that allows you to have people basically just submit photos in to the stream. And it’s pretty cool. It’s — I don’t know if you sipped it through but I was watching it while I was waiting for my flight and there’s a lot of good stuff, just speakers and there’s some other random stuff for like people, you know, saying “On my way out of MicroConf” and so it’s a picture of, you know, the gas station or something but there are some good ones in there.

[26:38] Mike: I’m looking at it now. It’s pretty awesome seeing all that stuff —

[26:41] Rob: Yeah.

[26:41] Mike: … on there.

[26:42] Rob: Won’t leave it up till I think till next year, you know.

[26:44] Mike: Yeah.

[26:44] Rob: There’s a longer URL. It’s like montabe.com/ you know, whatever but we just have MicroConfPics.com directing there.

[26:50] Mike: Right.

[26:51] Rob: When I talk to people about what they thought was the most inspirational talk because I guess you should back up and say like one of the first things that I said when the conference open was you should get — I want you to get at least one piece of inspiration and three actionable takeaways from the conference. So do that, write them down and then at the end, I’m going to ask people about it. And so then at the very end we got, you know, hands raised and people are calling out all these things that they were going to do next week based on what they’ve learned at the conference whether from the speakers, side conversation or whatever.

[27:16] And so in asking about the inspirational stuff, a lot of people mentioned Adii. Adii is the founder of WooThemes. A lot of folks use it. We use it in the academy. And he had flown in from South Africa. It was like 31 hours of travel each way. And he had a great story just of really bootstrapping and starting small and then getting big very quickly. He had a big growth curve and even like the week before MicroConf, they basically got hacked. Someone deleted everything from their servers including all their backups and he almost didn’t come in to MicroConf but he did and he adjusted his talks so that it included some stuff about his hack. It turns out they move to WP engine because, you know, they’ve been hacked so they moved over there and then they got DDOS at on WP Engine so it took some of their servers down.

[28:00] So we had basically speakers because Jason Cohen, you know, is the founder of WP Engine and two speakers who had basically had sites down within the day or two before MicroConf and I told them both, you know, you and I both told them like “You guys don’t need to be here if you need to go take care business.” But they had their teams on it. That was a cool story to hear. And neat to see that they were able to come in and I felt like they were enjoying themselves and weren’t too hung up on that. And obviously, you know, everyone is back up now. And to summarize like Adii’s — the title of his talk was “How I went from zero to seven figures in 13 months”. So that’s pretty, pretty impressive.

[28:34] Originally talked with, it was like two years but then when he looked, he said, oh it was only 13 months. And there were a couple of volunteers I really wanted to thank. Robert Graham, he’s an academy member. He volunteered to help out with the AV stuff. Just hope to getting people miked up in with the sound. And then Dave Rodenbaugh who was the photographer last year also an academy member and listener of the podcast and such, he helped out. He took all of the official pictures and I don’t think those are on MicroConfPics yet but once I get them from him, I will submit them because that will be — he took like the speaker group photo and you know, bunch of stuff on stage and really had the run of the place.

[29:12] And so we had no plans. We had a welcome reception Sunday night. WildBit sponsored something Monday night. And then we knew that we would throw something together Tuesday night but it was like two hours beforehand and we walked in to this sports bar and basically said, “Can we come in here in two hours throw down an American Express and get a 120 people in here?” and they told us yes. So we round up going in there, having some drinks, chatting and just kind of wrapping up the conference and exchanging ideas and thoughts and such. What was your favorite part of that, that part of the evening?

[29:40] Mike: I would say that it was near the end of the tab that we put together where I got an itemized bill for everything that if I look around, I’m sure that I still have it but it was probably about three or four feet long and there’s — there’s actually a picture of it they got tweeted out and it’s on that on the Montabe site at MicroConfPics.com. But it shows me just holding it up and it’s, I don’t know, down to like my waist easy. [Laughter]

[30:06] Rob: Yeah, I like that. Eliza Brock that one —

[30:08] Mike: Yeah, I think so. Speaking of Eliza, she also — she made this really, really cool little notebooks. She had those made and sent them over to the hotel to hand out to everybody. And it’s this tiny red notebooks and they say “Think Small” on them.

[30:23] Rob: Yup. And there are like nice leather bound. She got in touch with us in advance and asked if she could basically sponsor the conference in that way and she put, you know, business card in there. She’s a Ruby developer I’m thinking. We got more positive feedback about that than probably any other giveaway I thought. I mean people are really taking them. My wife is still has hers and is using it as a notebook. She really liked it.

[30:42] Mike: Yeah, I used it for throughout the conference just because I needed something to, you know, write down all of — all the different giveaways and things like that so that, you know, I wouldn’t forget them when we were up on stage and everything else. And you know, she made various notes about different things I want to make sure we covered.

[30:56] Rob: Typically you get this big bag and it’s full of a lot of paper and a lot of, I don’t know, t-shirts and other books and stuff and we do all almost all digital aside from that little notebook we did. And we talked about it quite a bit more the first year but I don’t anyone really ask the second year but we just do that because we don’t want to create a bunch of waste, right? We don’t want people throwing the bag away and throwing the t-shirt away and all that stuff.

[31:16] Mike: Yeah, I mean there’s not much point to, you know, conferences generate a lot of waste so there’s not much point to giving people stuff that you know is just going to end up in the garbage. And I see that in other conferences I’ve gone to where I get a bag and you know, some t-shirts or books or things like that and I look at most of it and I’m just like I’m not really crazy about any of the stuff. So, we’d tried to, you know, minimize as much of the impacts as we can. And there’s a couple of different ways we do that and obviously, one, we don’t give away things that are just going to ultimately end up in a trash. And the second thing is that the conference badge holders that we used, they’re actually biodegradable.

[31:53] Rob: That’s right. I brought them back last year and composted them.

[31:56] Mike: Uh huh.

[31:57] Rob: I was just reminded, my wife came just for 24 hours and we left our kids with some friends. And so she came out. She did my intro, right? She introed me before my talk and we got a lot of positive feedback about that. And then [Laughter], people were saying, she’s a psychologist, and they were saying that she should talk next year. And then I saw a thread on Twitter and it started getting retweeted. And it was like, “I want to see Mrs. Rob Walling.” [Laughter] And this was @robwalling, you know, that’s my Twitter name. And someone says, “I want to see Mrs. @robwalling talking next year about the Psychology Entrepreneurship.” And then one was like, “I want to see Mrs. Rob Walling talking next year about the Psychology of Raising a Family and how to do that and you know, be an entrepreneur.” And it was pretty cool. I would actually — and then Hiten actually came up and he was saying like, “You should write a book” and it was kind of fun. Her intro kind of blew me away because I totally did not expect the heartfelt intro she gave.

[32:37] Mike: Uh huh. Yeah and that kind of brings up something else we didn’t, you know, talk about so far is that the conference itself, even among the speakers, it was very family-oriented. That’s not the vibe that you get from most of other conference. I mean honestly from any other conferences I’ve ever been to, it’s just not the vibe you get from them.

[32:37] Rob: That is interesting like because basically, didn’t Jason Cohen have a picture of his daughter? Yes because he talked about one of her toys broke and it fit in to that context of the conversation. And then almost every — every speaker after that had a picture of their child. But MicroConf is not like the YC crowd, the Y Combinator crowd. It is more people 25 to 45, maybe a little older. It’s that range, right? Because of most of us have families, have a mortgage, are not in the position to raise venture capital. I mean that’s why we’re doing it. And so it’s people who are going to be more likely to listen to this podcast rather than, you know, this week in Startups with Jason Calacanis or to apply for YC funding and be able to live on Ramen and then move to Boston for three months.

[33:46] And I think I got several attendees. I had them tell me that they were maybe surprised by that, that they thought they would come and it would be, you know, more of like the Startup funded-type of conference and just the entire attendee-based was different.

[33:59] Mike: A couple of speakers made it a point to mention that, you know, the reason we do this isn’t necessarily to get rich. It’s to, you know, make a living and support our families and you know, so that they can in turn support us. I mean making money is great and all but it’s not necessarily the “and all be all” of why you do what you do. I mean it makes for a nice score card I guess but ultimately, there’s a lot of things in life that are much more important than money.

[34:23] Rob: Right. That comes back to the freedom and the lifestyle, right? And that’s what we — I mean we don’t — we don’t bang on the lifestyle there in too much because it’s kind of cliché these days. But we do, you and I do talk a lot about like putting your, basically putting your life before your business and using your business as a way to support that and they provide the frame for you and you know, your family and just flexibility and the happiness you can get from that without having to go after this huge eight figure pay out or raise, you know, huge amounts of money and put your family through the ring or during — during the course of it.

[34:54] Mike: Yeah, that’s not something I think I could do. I mean I’ve considered in the past going after funding but, you know, looking back on it, I really don’t think that it’s something that I could realistically do.

[35:06] Rob: I try — we tried to raise angel funding. I say we, there’s a couple of a MBAs I met in New Haven. We tried to raise angel funding a couple of times, it didn’t work. And then Y Combinator, I applied and got to the second round. I mean I was in that whole cycle thing, you know, that’s back in 2007. And these days, it would be easier. I bet, you know, I wouldn’t have a hard of a time raising funding but I just don’t — that’s just not the path that I think either of us want to travel these days and obviously, there are a lot of folks that agree with us because MicroConf is the conference for self-funded startups and single founders. It’s not about raising money. It is about building businesses that are profitable and that don’t require that kind of sacrifice to your life in order to get them going.

[35:45] Mike: And I think that’s what resonates with so many people. I mean I think that’s why we’re able to go to a conference for a 40% year over year and it looks like conceivably we could probably grow out more if we really wanted to but there’s other considerations there as well.

[35:59] Rob: What do you think we could improve next year or what are the things you thought while we were doing it like hey, this isn’t working or we should add this or that?

[36:07] Mike: Ugh, tough question.

[36:08] Rob: Because we did everything so perfect.

[36:10] Mike: No. You know, it’s interesting because Monday night after the party that WildBit had thrown at Rumor, I was talking with a bunch of people there specifically about the conference and they said that this year’s conference was so much better than last year’s. And I started pushing for information skill. I started asking, you know, what makes it better, why is this year better than last year. And nobody can give me a concrete answer for anything. I mean obviously —

[36:36] Rob: That makes it hard.

[36:37] Mike: The venue itself was obviously an upgrade and I asked, well, does everything seem better because the venue is better. And the answer was no but, you know, nobody could really put their finger on exactly what made things better. You know, maybe it had something to do with the speaker line up, maybe it didn’t. Maybe it was the location. Maybe it was the atmosphere. I mean because the atmosphere at the Hard Rock is significantly different than it was at the Riviera. So I tried to dig in and find those things. I think it’s probably going to take some time because I don’t have anything at the top of my head that I can come up with that says, you know, we screw this up. It’d be nice to have a coordinator and that’s part of what, you know, raising the price with allow us to do is to have a coordinator so that we can spend our time connecting people together rather than managing and running the conference itself.

[37:25] Rob: Yeah, I would agree. Now, we’re going to be sending surveys out to the attendees. So that’ll help us well getting more feedback. I got lot of in person feedback and some via e-mail and most of it was from stuff that was in my head or it was — it’s minor tweaks. It’s like, “Oh, you should maybe add a panel here. You should maybe do some shorter talks here and there.” It was stuff that I think could visibly make it better but would also be experimental. It’s not like, “Oh there was a big …” Like last year was year, it was obvious that the talks, they were too long, they were back-to-back, there weren’t enough breaks. I mean I feel like we fixed that this year, you know, we shorten them down and we made a lot of tweaks [0:38:00] that I think really improve the experience at the conference. I think the venue was also a lot better. The room was just it had a better feel to it. It was tight but I thought that was cool. I thought there was a lot of energy in the room because it wasn’t this huge open space like last year’s conference room was.

[38:15] Mike: Yeah, I think that that’s definitely something that I think we should maintain is making sure that the space is kind of tight. I mean not that we really have much choice about it this year just because the space was — I mean that they had available so the things really worked out in that regard but definitely having only — what do we have? I think three seats available in the entire place and that was it. And that definitely help with the vibe and the atmosphere of the place.

[38:41] Rob: Yeah, so I guess we have to take a look at the surveys once we get them back. Obviously we do already have a running list of potential speakers for next year, some thoughts on some tweaks and minor improvements but overall, man, you know, I’m glad it’s over this year and I had a blast, obviously, a lot of work. Are you up for doing it again next year?

[39:00] Mike: Yeah, I am. It’s interesting because how was it? It was probably about three days after the conference I got — I was really depressed like all weekend. I’m like, oh the conference is over and I’ve got — I’m really energized and you know, motivated that I’ve got all the great ideas and stuff. And I think I was depressed because I’m like, oh no, where do I start? [Laughter]

[39:20] Rob: Yeah.

[39:20] Mike: I think that was it —

[39:21] Rob: That makes sense.

[39:21] Mike: … more than anything else. It was — it took me I think most of the weekend to get out of it. I think yesterday I kind of solidify things and today’s even much, much better than that. So I’m at the point now where I’m like, kind of gone whole again but it really took a few days for me to kind of swing out of that. And I don’t know why. I mean that just seems countered through to me. I didn’t expect that at all.

[39:41] Rob: I think I went to the same process. I think maybe I was — I had a little easier time because I took a lot of things people said and channeled it directly in to like, “What am I going to do with HitTail?” because HitTail has been my goal project to work on once MicroConf was done. So I was already thinking in those terms. So it’s maybe a little easier to translate that. But I agree. It took me [0:40:00] — I mean jeez, my wife and I actually went on, well with the kids, went to Yosemite just drop off a hat and she’s like “Let’s go up. It’s about two hours from here.” And so we went up and then we just stayed and we stayed until through Monday. During that time, it was just kind of rest and relaxation to kind of regroup. And so it was almost a week after MicroConf before I could even sit down and to e-mail again. And of course, I had I don’t know 400 unread e-mails or something but there’s definitely some recovery time afterwards to kind of regroup because I think you’d just have so much going on in your head, you know, thinking about the conference and just try to participate and provide value and get some value yourself.

[40:34] Mike: Yeah, I was listening to episode 74. I think it was last week or the week before. You know, we were talking about the number of things that we each had that we were working and I’ve said that after MicroConf is basically over and it drops off our list of things to do and I don’t know what I was thinking saying that because all the stuff now that MicroConf is over that still needs to get done. [Laughter]

[40:55] Rob: All the clean up by now, me too. I’m reimbursing speakers and you’re dealing with sponsors and thanking, I mean, doing all that stuff. Yeah, there’s still another, another week or two of it.

[41:00] [music]

[41:07] Mike: If anyone is interested in signing up for the MicroConf mailing list, go to microconf.com and we’re already taking e-mails for the launch for next year. And as Rob said earlier, I mean unless you’re on that list, chances are good that, you know, tickets are going to be gone by the time they get out to I call it the General Press of people out there.

[41:27] Rob: And if you have a question or comment, please call it in to our voicemail number at 888-801-9690 or you can e-mail it to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from “We’re Outta Control” by MoOt, used under Creative Commons. You can subscribe to this podcast in iTunes if you just search for Startups or you can subscribe via RSS at StartupsfortheRestofUs.com where you’ll also find a transcript to each episode. Thanks for listening. See you next time. 

Show Notes

Transcript

[00:00] Rob: This is Startups For The Rest of Us: Episode 79.

[00:03] [music]

[00:11] Rob: Welcome to Startups For The Rest Of Us, the podcast to help developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching the Startups whether you built your first one or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Rob.

[00:20] Mike: And I’m Mike.

[00:20] Rob: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. It’s MicroConf day. What’s the word this week, Mike?

[00:29] Mike: Beer makes you smarter. [Laughter]

[00:30] Rob: Wait, what? I’m confused.

[00:32] Mike: I’ve saw this article and it basically said that beer makes you smarter. And it was based on — pretty sure it was a formal study from the University of Illinois in Chicago. And they basically took 40 participants and took 20 of them and gave them a couple of beers before putting them in to this game and then challenge them to — they’ve give them three words and a series and then they would challenge them to name a forth word. And the people who had a couple of beers were dramatically better at naming that forth word than the people who hadn’t.

[01:03] Rob: Right. So, it doesn’t actually make you smarter. It makes you better at this very specific task.

[01:08 ] Mike: Yeah, it — and they actually thought that it had a lot to do with coming up with ideas. If you have a couple of drinks then and there’s something about the way that, you know, the chemicals react within your brain that make you better at problem solving. I saw a variation of this particular article someplace else that had some different theories on it. So there was nothing actually concrete on it and I’m sure that it would take much more studies which I would be more than happy to part take in. But —

[01:33] Rob: Me — [Laughter] This fall off — this falls in line with something I’ve read years ago and something I’ve done quite a bit is when I want to sit down and do writing and I really want to get a lot done in 10 in the evenings especially, I will have a glass — one to two glasses of red wine to help me do the first draft and just get it out unedited and then when I revised, I will tend to want to be more empt and really in to the material more detail-oriented. And that’s when I do like a cup of coffee or some kind of caffeine [0:02:00]. And I read years ago that it’s like one glass of red wine to write, one glass of coffee or a cup of coffee to revise. And now I’m seeing other people, I think Tim Ferriss was on the TV show the other day called A Day In The Life on Hulu. And he does the same thing. He’s basically like I have one to two glasses of red wine in the evening right before I start my writing. And I thought it was, that covers this I mean this fits in to that, right? It’s the whole creativity and kind of left brain versus right brain like activating certain censors. I’m sure it’s what it does.

[02:26] Mike: Yeah. I’ve found that I’ve been able to like if I have a couple of beers, I’ll be sitting and writing code and stuff. And I’ll be — I haven’t measured it but I feel like I’m a lot more productive could be just the beer talk. [Laughter]

[02:37] Rob: Right.

[02:38] [music]

[02:41] Mike: As you were saying, today is MicroConf. What’s the — what’s the word on your — your end?

[02:44] Rob: Today is MicroConf. We obviously recorded a week earlier but actually it’s going live on the day that the MicroConf is happening. So hopefully, we’re having fun right now and everything is going well. There may be a week off next week and then the week after, we’ll come back with our — our MicroConf wrap up episode. And I also wanted to give a shout out to Steve at digitaltoolfactory.net and actually a thanks because he talked about one of our episodes and he basically said I love the title, “Startups for the Rest of Us has the greatest quote ever on entrepreneurship”. [Laughter] And the quote was from a couple of episodes ago and it was the “Employees complain entrepreneurs to get it done”. So that was cool. Thanks for quoting us there, Steve.

[03:20] And then the other thing, there were several comments on episodes 77 and 78. These are on the actual blog sites startupsfortherestofus.com. And Justin Jackson said a couple of things based on we were talking about forums and CRM Software and such. And he — he reminded us that Basecamp isn’t CRM Software. It’s Highrise with the CRM Software. Basecamp is Project Management. So, we just misspoke there. And then the other thing he said is that we’re making assumptions about visiting a competitor who is an — who has an outdated website. He said that they just updated their site, which they haven’t really touched since 2004. What were they doing? Serving customers. “Our business was growing so fast from referrals.” They literally didn’t have time to update it. So they’re at industrymailout.com.

[04:05] And I have — I have some thoughts on that because I still think — I think it depends on whether your market is online or offline —

[04:11] Mike: Right.

[04:11] Rob: As other — you can tell, you know, if that business is really hitting it and whether you can out market them online. If their site really is old and they’re growing by referral, that’s good for them. But if — if there is demand online and they’re not going after it, I do still think that what you said which was, you know, old sites can be an indicator that they’ve kind of check out their online marketing and I think there could be room for you.

[04:32] Mike: Yeah and again, I mean that list that we talked about was just things that you can look at. I mean, not any single one of them is going to be concrete proof that you’re going to be able to evaluate them effectively. I mean you really have to combine a bunch of different things before you can come to those decisions. But again, it goes back to beating them online and if their site hasn’t been updated, it doesn’t matter how well they’re doing offline, you know, the fact is you should be able to beat them with the online marketing. But — I mean he does bring up a very valid point that if they’re doing great business offline, then it probably doesn’t take much more than a site redesign for them to kind of bump themselves up in the search engine rankings especially if they’ve had a site for a while.

[05:10] Rob: Yeah. So thanks, Justin for that comment. We appreciate everyone who’s — who’s participating whether they’re e-mailing us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com, calling in to our voicemail number at 888-801-9690 or posting to the blog.

[05:25] Mike: Are you front loading that stuff now?

[05:27] Rob: I —

[05:27] Mike: [Laughter]

[05:28] Rob: It’s a one final comment. This was on episode 78 and it was by Mark Stephens. This was the episode titled Things You Should Give Up. And he said, “One thing I would add to your list of things to give-up (especially for startups) is to give up the need for everything to be perfect. Some things just need to be okay and you can then focus your efforts for perfection where it matters. Geoffrey Moore did a brilliant talk on this a few years ago at Business of Software.”

[05:50] Mike: That’s a fantastic point. [Laughter]

[05:52] Rob: I know. I know this.

[05:52] Mike: Really, really is.

[05:53] Rob: That’s a good one. Yeah, we should’ve maybe if we had time we could added a few more to the list but I second that thought.

[06:00] [music]

[06:02] Mike: Today we’re going to be talking about the top five reasons that your business fail. When you talk about Startups, the issues of success and failure tend to come up. And what we’re going to be focusing today on is business failure rather than product failure. There’s nothing inherently wrong with your product idea failing but when the business itself fails, there’s fundamental flaws in the execution of the business and the business going after or certain products.

[06:26] So, that’s kind of the — just to what we’re trying to get at today is that there’s differences between product failure and business failure. And we’re focusing today on business failure.

[06:34] Rob: Are you — are you talking about like if a business has multiple products that one of them can fail or you’re talking about just a single product not working, doesn’t mean that your business fails, you can launch another one?

[06:45] Mike: Yeah, sort of. So if you have — if you start a business and you start pursuing a product and that product fails for whatever reason, you can pivot and go to a new product or you can launch a variation of that product or a completely new product. And your business hasn’t failed but the product has but that’s okay. I mean, building and launching product is kind of a process that you have to go through and some products are going to do well and some of them aren’t. But you obviously want to minimize the product failures as much as possible because that minimizes the amount of time that you have to, I guess meander through business trying to figure out which products are going to do well in keeping business and which ones aren’t.

[07:22] But if you have fundamental flaws in your business and in the execution of the plans for those different products, then you’re going to have much more serious issues and it doesn’t matter what products you have. Then you’re eventually going to fail because the business itself fails. It’s not necessarily the product failing.

[07:39] Rob: Yeah, let’s dive in.

[07:40] Mike: The first reason that businesses will fail is because you don’t actually get started. And this one I think a lot of people fall in to this. Too many people spend too much time building up the idea of a business rather than actually building the business itself. And we talked about some of these things back in episode 71 where we talked about all the different things that you shouldn’t pay for early on in the business. And by doing all of those things instead of trying to build the business and build the products that you need to launch, then you’re never actually building the business itself.

[08:10] Rob: Yeah, this reminds me — I published a post a couple of years ago now probably and it was called Lesser Known Traits of Successful Founders or something. And one of the traits that I listed was how quickly do you respond to opportunity. And I feel like that has a lot to do with people who I’ve seen succeed, right? It’s — there’s a difference between sitting with a notebook and making list of 10, 20, 50 business ideas over the course of many years which I used to do and I think a lot of wannabe founders are guilty of doing. And I don’t say wannabe in the native way, I really just mean people who want to start companies. I think that it’s more about, you know, having a bunch of ideas and really thinking them through too far before you actually just start putting some feet on the ground and you start talking to customers and get an idea of people want to do it.

[08:57] I’m actually, you know, in typical entrepreneur fashion, I have my notebook and even in the last week I’ve been adding new business ideas, new product ideas to it as I’ve read a few essays that have got me thinking and already I’m looking at them and saying what can I do this week or next maybe after MicroConf that can give me an idea of whether or not this will succeed without me mauling them over for six months like I used to like. Over analysis is just — it’s so painful and it’s so, so common I think with a lot of us.

[09:27] Mike: It’s something else that goes along with that that you didn’t directly mentioned was if I need too much time trying to think of the perfect idea because it’s going to be really difficult to find the perfect idea these days. I mean you’ve mentioned it another of times on previous podcast where the best time you started business was five years ago and then the next best time was four years ago. I mean, you really — you’d just need to get started and if you’re not getting started, then you never going to get anywhere.

[09:51] So, number two on the list is giving up too early. This is the almost the opposite of not getting started. It’s just giving up way too early. When you run in the hard times, you basically have two options. You have to either give up or you push through. And it’s a lot easier to give up than to push through as hard times.

[10:07] Rob: This is a very tough question to answer of whether or not you should give up or push through when you hit a road block. And I’ve actually been having conversations with a few different entrepreneurs over the past couple of months, the guys who were just getting started. They’re early in idea phase. Some of them had written code launch and then got their initial customer base and realized that they needed to pivot. Basically that it wasn’t a viable business even though you had a market research show that it was. There’s obviously a lot of uncertainty but I would say that there’s a lot of art in there being entrepreneur. But others are still in the idea phase and the question that comes up most often is when should I dump this idea. There’s no answer, right? I mean it depends. There’s no one answer.

[10:48] The biggest realization that I’ve had as I’ve talked to these guys is that sitting there, having them go often do some research, pound up the numbers, give it some thought, talk to some customers and then come back to me and have a conversation. For me to then try to get to the meat of the question has worked out really well. And the reason is because the person doing, the entrepreneur doing the research is too close to the problem. They can’t actually see the forest for the trees and I’m removed enough from it. I haven’t done all the research. I haven’t spend only hours in it but then I’m basically able to ask of these the key questions and we can sit there together and obviously not making the decisions for these guys but to kind of push them in the direction of doing some more research or maybe think about when they are really passionate about the idea. And almost — there’s almost never a yes or no. It’s almost always comes down to if you’re really passionate about this and you really think it can succeed, then even though some of the signs are saying no, you should do it.

[11:44] And then on the flip side, there are even some minor road blocks here and you just kind of aren’t that interested in the idea? Maybe if you found out that the idea is viable and there is a market for it but it’s going to require a lot of say cold calling or in person sale and you’ve just not or not sure you want to do that, then maybe even though it could [0:12:00] be a viable business, maybe you should think about not doing it. And that’s typically where it winds up, right? It winds up being a personal choice because it’s almost never a yes or no. It’s more option than not a weighing of different positive and negative factors. And getting that list of positive and negative factors on to a piece of paper is challenging but I really recommend the two-person approach that would kind of stumbled upon here in the past few months.

[12:23] Mike: And just to be clear of what you’ve said so far is completely focused on giving up or not as opposed to taking the product and pivoting, right?

[12:31] Rob: Yeah, that’s right. So that’s also been part of the conversation. These days, I would never — almost never tell an entrepreneur to totally give up not unless you really don’t want to be a founder anymore. To me, that’s — that’s when you give up but almost — in almost all cases, it’s been pivoting the thing. And even, you know, one guy like pivoted from something to help with documentation and he was almost pivoting, going to pivot like in to a completely different vertical but there was at least some code base he was going to reuse and there was some knowledge that he had learned about how businesses make purchasing decisions that he had learned by talking through some initial prospects and the couple of customers that they did purchased from them. So, it’s really — I guess I’ve heard the phrase like a pivot is just, you know, a switch to another product idea and a leap I think is when you really probably keep the same company shell but you just almost revamp the product entirely, maybe moving in to a completely different product.

[13:19] So, I think if we say that giving up is doing a leap or doing a pivot, then — then that’s what more of what I’ve been talking about. I haven’t been telling anyone to give up being a founder.

[13:27] Mike: The number three on this list was being unable to pivot. But again going back to the original topic for this particular podcast, it was giving up too early on a business, not necessarily on the products because products, you can — you can obviously give up on a product because as you said it just doesn’t appeal to you anymore. But if business itself and running the business doesn’t appeal to you anymore, then that’s, I would say a much more serious fundamental issue than just not being interested in the product.

[13:54] Rob: Yeah, this actually relates back to another one I’ve post Lesser Known Traits of Successful Founders that I’ve mentioned and it’s how flexible are you. You know, if you’re married to a product idea or business idea and you’ve been following it for — in your head for years, it’s hard to let it go. You become married to it and that’s a real dangerous especially with how quickly things move these days. And so having the flexibility to just say I’ve built this awesome, you know, whatever it is a CMS or invoicing software and it’s totally not working out in this vertical and I’m just going to switch and I’m going to now do it for mortgage brokers. To be able to do that, if it’s the right business decision, it can be a real indicator of whether or not you’re going to succeed as a founder.

[14:33] I think every startups story that you read involves several adjustments to the vision. And even though you read and you think oh PayPal and Netflix and all these companies that achieved big success where with that from the start Facebook is the same way. When you really read the story and you get in to it and you heard the founders talking about it, they almost all started as pretty different ideas then they’ve eventually round up and the founders were smart enough to noticed that they needed to change course and they had the flexibility and the willingness to perhaps give a part of their initial vision or all of their initial vision when they realized that, you know, another part of the business was essentially taking off.

[15:11] Mike:  So number four on the list is you don’t make the business a priority. And I think this trap is really easy to fall in to for a lot of people especially when you’re first getting started because you always have time down the road and if you keep telling yourself that there will be time later, I’ll get to it, I’ll get to it and you don’t make time for the business if you don’t make the business itself a priority for yourself, it just never going to happen. I mean, you really need to buckle down and execute on things because that’s insanely important for being successful.

[15:39] Rob: And I think the big question that, you know, you should ask yourself if you can start to this, “Can you focus long enough to deliver? Are you focusing on the business or are you letting other things become a priority?” We talked about in the past about how it’s really fun to watch TV and go hang out with friends at Happy Hour but those friends typically aren’t the ones that are starting a business on the side and so, if you have a 9 to 5 and you want to start a business and you want to go out every night, something has to give.

[16:04] The other thing I’m seeing is the phase of innovation and the phase of how fast things are moving, it feels to me like it’s accelerating even more. Even in boring niches where there was no competition 5, 7 years ago. They’re starting to be some competition and then as you edge in to even minorly interesting niches, there’s a lot more competition and that was a couple of years ago. And then as you get into the bay hot tech areas, you look at things like Pinterest or any type of Facebook or location-based mobile apps, all that stuff.

[16:35] Like if you wait 30 days, the landscape has changed substantially enough but if you have not acted quickly and gotten something out, you may have miss the boat. It’s that fast like it’s a matter of months before the really hot niches are changing and we don’t necessarily recommend getting in to the hot niches because they do change so fast and they tend to have people working 24/7 on a move, raise funding and all kinds of stuff. But as I said, this trickles all the way down and even in the medium to low interest niches that aren’t that sexy, they’re changing so fast that you really need to think about how quickly you can move and get to market these days.

[17:09] Mike: And the last reason your business will fail is because you aren’t building processes for your business. This goes back more to making sure that you’re building things that can be repeated. You know, you need to build a business process for handling whatever it is that it can be handed off to somebody else to be repeated and that comes to just about anything whether it’s your sales process, your funnels, the code itself, I mean what you’re trying to do when you’re building your business is build processes that can be followed that can later be skilled and by skilled I mean either hand them off to somebody else so that one other person does them or you handed it off to a computer. But then you take those things and you can essentially off load them from yourselves so you can concentrate on other things.

[17:51] Rob: Have you heard the term “Earn out”?

[17:53] Mike: I have heard the term, I don’t recall specifically what it is.

[17:56] Rob: So an earn out is if you sell your business and the acquiring company makes you stick around for what’s called an earn out.

[18:04] Mike: Oh yes. Yup.

[18:05] Rob: So you get some of the money upfront and then if you stick around for two years, you get another big check or one year, you know, whatever the term they decided. And I was actually talking to a founder whose business got acquired probably about a year ago now. I was just e-mailing with him this week and he said that they had so many processes in place and so much of the stuff was — I won’t say automated but it was basically documented and enough was automated that he was able to walk away with the holy grill of acquisitions which is where you get your money and you walk away the day of the sale closes. That’s very rare.

[18:38] The thing is these processes, they don’t just make your life easier while you’re running your business. They actually make you way more attractive to an acquiring company if you ever want to sell it and it will basically increase your revenue, your income per hour work. Because the more you automate, the less you have to work in your business and the more you can really, you know, work on your businesses as Michael Gerber says.

[19:00] There is the book called Built To Sell. It’s called as like a parable, like just a story of this guy who’s selling his business and when I first started listening to it, I kind of groaned like this is going to be terribly cheesy but it turns out by the end I was really rooting for the guy in the story. The author covers things that you should do if you ever plan on selling your business and how to make it more saleable and talks about getting repeatable processes and getting paid in advance and having recurring revenue and being specialized and just some things like that.

[19:25] It’s pretty sure a book. It’s worth to read but the most important thing I took away from it is even if I don’t want to sell my businesses, all of the things he says in there are ways to make your business more efficient and just make it a better business for you to run. So that you can spend your time doing things that are more interesting to you that could include maybe potentially, you know, starting launching other product line or doing something else that is fun. I mean as entrepreneurs we’re creators and we want to do the new stuff and so, you don’t want to sit there day to day doing things that you could essentially just processes for and hand off to other people peacefully.

[19:56] Mike: Yeah and everything that you said was kind of a whole point of that is, you know, if you’re putting these processes in place, then those processes can – they can be followed by you but they could be followed by somebody else or by one or more people that just scale out and help make your business that much more profitable so you’re working, as you said, on your business as supposed to in it.

[20:16] Rob: So, hey Mike. I want to add one other. I know we said top 5 reasons but one occurred to me as we were talking. And it’s one – we definitely covered this before because it’s more of a psychological or mind set one. But the question I throw out is do you have confidence in your ability to execute? The question is not “Can you execute?” Because I believe most people can execute on ideas and most people can eventually be successful if they work hard enough at it and trying of ideas that will eventually happen.

[20:42] The question is do you have confidence in your ability to execute? Do you really believe that you can do this? And are you going to stick around after the first 6-month low, you know, where your sales drop, do you believe that you can correct that? Because if you don’t, then the odds are that you are going to do number two which was give up too early because the less confidence you have in your ability to execute, then the more likelier are going to be to basically close up shop.

[21:07] Mike: Yeah, I found there were things that I’m either not interested in doing or that I feel like I don’t have the ability or knowledge to do it. I tend to procrastinate with those things and put them off in a way that’s not much different than just giving up. I mean, it’s amazing how little time that it actually takes once I’ve made those decisions to buckle down and do it. There was something I was trying to get through, I don’t know, maybe 3 or 4 weeks ago and I kept putting it off and putting it off and then finally I just said “Look, I got to get this done.” And I just sat down and did it and it took me like two hours to do.

[21:39] Rob: Yeah. Have those all the time and so frustrating. It is crazy, huh, when you’re gifted at something or when you’re skilled at it like writing code, I think that’s why we all fallen to the developer’s trap of I can write codes so I’m going to go build the product because that’s what I know had to do whereas the marketing staff talking to customers, market research, whatever, you know, all these other things are going to building the product that may in fact be more involved with the success of the product than the actual code you’re going to write. We ignore that because we procrastinate.

[22:06] I think we do it on purpose as much as just maybe not having confidence in our ability to execute on these things or feeling like you’re wasting time because learning is time consuming. I mean if you go out and start doing talking to customers and you’re not very good at it, you almost feel like “Oh, I’m just wasting my time. I could be back home, you know, just writing tens of thousands of lines of code.” It’s so much more efficient but I mean as we know, it’s like yeah, it’s efficient unless you’re building something no one wants and the way to find out if they want it is by talking to those customers.

[22:34] Mike: You know, that’s one of the challenges that you kind of have to overcome is just buckling down and working through those tough times or do you have confidence in your abilities actually execute on those things.

[22:44] Rob: I think what’s interesting is you don’t necessarily have to have like the utmost confidence and I am a brilliant marketer if you’ve never done it, you know, or I am great at customer development if you’ve never done it. But you have a confidence in your ability to go over on those things.

[22:56] Mike: I almost want to say that even comes to that, I would almost say that it comes down to your ability and willingness to go out on the limb and actually making attempt and if you’re making an attempt then chances are good that you’re probably doing more than the guy next to you.

[23:12] Rob: Yeah right. When you’re reading Hacker News articles, it is probably equivalent to two weeks of actually launching a startup. Right? I mean I’m making up numbers —

[23:21] Mike: [Laughter]

[23:22] Rob: … a little bit of something like that, it’s like a 100 to 1 ratio of the amount of progress and learning and understanding you will achieve by actually doing it and failing than you would by just reading about other people doing it and failing.

[23:35] Mike: Or just being mediocre at them and you don’t even have to be the best in the world at it as long as you’re actually trying it and that you are making progress. I mean, that’s the important thing as you’re making progress towards those things.

[23:46] Rob: Yeah and if you look back at anyone’s story, yours and mine included, I had a number, I think yeah, I never actually set the timeline out until I was on Mixergy a couple of months ago but it was like I had five or six failed ideas that I actually launched. I had ten more that I met, you know, [0:24:00] never been satellite the day that I had mentioned but I had a number that I spent months and months building and then launch and they failed before I have my first success. And you even look at these gaming companies that have sold for hundreds of millions recently but bottom line is like OMGPOP which is sold for a hundred something million. They had nothing in the bank like the dude had just laid off a half of his staff and he add $1800 in the bank and they had been around for six years and had 15 failed games and then this one was the fastest growing iPhone app ever in terms of downloads.

[24:31] Now, that’s hitting the startup lottery in a way and getting acquired but the bottom line is if you didn’t have skin in the game and if you didn’t keep coming back at it and have some failures, you know, that wouldn’t have happened. And the same thing with Rovio. Rovio had over or at least 15 games in mobile games and that kind of stuff. And by all accounts, they were not doing that well before Angry Birds and then Angry Birds is, you know, it’s basically a multi-billion dollar franchising now. They’re doing a TV show, they’re doing a movie based on Angry Birds, all the licensing. My kid has gummy Angry Birds that he bought at the Candies. I mean, they’re going all out on this thing and again, I’m not saying “Oh, do this and you will have a billion dollars because that’s not the goal. The realization is these guys failed a lot just like all of us have. Very, very few entrepreneurs come out of the gate and — and hit it big their first time. Every entrepreneur I talked to has had failed ideas before they succeed.

[25:23] Mike: Yeah, and even if you look at the — I don’t want to set a gold standard of, you know, entrepreneurs, you know, a lot of the high profile bloggers that you probably write over the years Fog Creek at Joel Spolsky at their home. What was one of their first projects [Phonetic] is I think CityDesk I believe.

[25:38] Rob: CityDesk, yup but it was like a CMS.

[25:39] Mike: Yeah. And that thing failed. I ended buying it at one point because I wanted to see what it was like and you know, started using it for my blog for wall and I was just like “Yeah, there’s just some contents that’s not working out the way that I want it to.” But, you know, that’s one of those examples where you look at somebody like him and say “Well, you know, he’s done all these things over the years. How could he possibly gone wrong? He worked at Microsoft and …” But that right there was one of those failures that, you know, nobody talks about and I think it’s important to realize that everyone has those failures. It’s just a matter of how you react to them.

[26:09] [music]

[26:13] Mike: So I think that about wrap us up. Our theme music is an excerpt from “We’re Outta Control” by MoOt, used under Creative Commons.

[26:19] Rob: Hey, did you know there’s a live version of “We’re Outta Control” by MoOt on Youtube?

[26:23] Mike: I did not.

[26:24] Rob: We should totally look it up, yeah, I’ve been seen it on Twitters and people were like they were mentioning that there’s a live version of “We’re Outta Control” on Spotify. I went on Youtube and search for it and they’re performing it live like it’s kind of cool to hear it. Of course I listened to the verse because we never actually play that part. Yeah, so we’ll link it up on the show now and so people can just search Youtube for MoOt “We’re Outta Control” to see that video.

[26:43] Mike: And you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes by searching for Startups or via RSS at StartupsfortheRestofUs.com.  Thanks for listening.  We’ll see you next time.

 

Show Notes

• Podcast mention on Code My Own Road
• 15 Things You Should Give up to Be Happy

Transcript

[00:00] Mike: This is Startups For The Rest Of Us: Episode 78.

[00:03] [Music] [Read more…] about Episode 78 | 8 Things You Should Give Up

Show Notes

• MicroConf 2012
• 37 Signals
• Rob’s book, Start Small Stay Small
• Compete.com
• Archive.org
• UserVoice
• Usenet
• SpyFu
• MixRank

Transcript

[00:00] Child: This is Startups For The Rest Of Us: Episode 77.

[Read more…] about Episode 77 | How to Determine Competition

Show Notes

• Altiris Training membership website
• MicroConf
• Niche Site Guy
• Brighton SEO Conference
• Scroogle.org

Transcript

[00:00] Rob: This is startups for the rest of us episode.

[00:03] [Music] [Read more…] about Episode 75 | Listener Questions Answered

Show Notes

• WP Engine
• Rob’s Mixergy Interview
• Rob’s Blogcast FM Interview
• MicroConf
• HitTail (Keyword Tool)
• Micropreneur Academy

Transcript

[Read more…] about Episode 74 | MicroConf, WP Engine, AuditShark & HitTail

Show Notes

• advertise.com
• pulse360.com
• adbright.com
• Mail Chimp
• Red Gate Software
• User Voice
• Kit Apps
• Constant Contact
• Tech Zing
• Netflix’s Chaos Monkey
• This Developer’s Life
• Micropreneur Academy

Transcript [Read more…] about Episode 73 | How To Deal With Service Outages

Show Notes

• Rapportive Gmail plugin
• Boomerang Gmail plugin
• Rob’s Startup Acquisition Post (part 1)
• HitTail Keyword Tool
• Verelo
• This podcast on iTunes
• Influads
• BuySellAds
• LaunchBit
• Mixrank

Transcript

[Read more…] about Episode 72 | 8 Tactics for Building Your Pre-Launch Mailing List

Show Notes

• Business of Software
• LessConf
• MicroConf
• Dreamhost

Transcript 

[Read more…] about Episode 71 | Premature Optimization of Your Business