Were you at Less Conference today? Myself and three other guys were running cameras of three varieties capturing the conf in all it’s glory. Snarky remarks and sometimes awkward questions from Steve Bristol kept the audience entertained and many of the speakers left me feeling nothing short of inspired. I do have a confessions, however, I’m actually a conference greenhorn – this is my first tech conference. And I’m having a blast.
Here is 5 quick things I learned today, hopefully you’ll find them of some use.
- “If you want to make money, build something people want.” So, I actually don’t have that great of a memory, and I didn’t write down who said this. But, it was either Chris Wanstrath, Dan Martell, or Cameron Moll – or maybe it wasn’t any of them – I actually have no idea. Ok moving on - this may seem obvious, but I’m sure this is a mistake that is made often. If you are a developer and you’re reading this, then you probably know about this way more than I do. I’m not a developer, I don’t build things, and I’m certainly not as cool as you are, in some respects anyway.
- Make something that advertises itself – delivered by Chris Wanstrath of GitHub. Think about this. Chris said adwords sucks, big budget marketing plans destroy. You have to create something where it’s very ability to be shared is built right in. He used YouTube as an example. Think about everytime someone sends you a funny video on YouTube. They had a little advertisement in each link (the url) that was constantly branding them. This is genius, and something simple that I never thought of that way.
- If you want to get good at something, you have to practice. Jason Fried applied this concept to making money. He said simply, “If I wanted to get damn good at making money, I knew I had to practice.” Again, this is a simple concept, paired with a new application that offers incite in a way I hadn’t thought of before.
- Creative pauses are essential to creative growth. Delivered by Cameron Moll, he was talking about the seeming anomaly of our creative creation during times of monotonous activity when our body is working but our minds have time to wander – think in the shower, lying in bed, driving, cooking, gym. He suggested going out of your way to be sure you have these times to yourself explaining them as absolutely essential to creative growth, just be sure you have the tools to record your ideas. One cool tip was keeping a dive slate in the shower. I use Evernote to keep notes, which syncs from my iPhone to my MacBook Pro.
- Instead of spending money on marketing your product spend money on making your product better so people talk about it. This point sorta ties into Point 2, but it emphasizes something of its own importance – always improve your product. Allan Branch was telling me something he did with LessAccounting that I thought was awesome. They brought on a couple bookkeeper VA’s (one off shore) to set up the books for new clients and review the books of existing clients. Doesn’t seem that great, huh? Get this, here’s what makes it awesome – it’s a free service. Well, you get it if you are a paid user. But think about the principle here. Screwing up your books is easy to do, unless you are a genius like Branch. If you jack ‘em up, they’ll fix ‘em up for nothing. They found a way to improve their product, which gave people a reason to talk about their brand.
That’s it. I’m tired and going to bed.
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thanx lotz, believe.