Why I'm running a bootstrapping conference in Vienna, Austria
unicornfree.com
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When my cofounder and I were in the really early stages we often were looking for inspiration and while we knew very well that lots of US and many UK bootstrapped SaaS products exist and thrive, we feared their success wouldn't easily translate to us.
We were thinking "Oh maybe people from the US and UK won't buy from continental europeans, who aren't native speakers, wo live in a different time zone, where (in the US case) totally different laws apply" and while in no way this was going to make us stop, it was constantly nagging in the background of - at least - my mind.
It has turned out this is not the case. As of today there was exactly one case where a company from the US told us they'd love to use our product, yet feared to export their sensitive data to the EU.
But before we knew that from hard evidence we had inspiration: letsfreckle.com (Vienna), mite.yo.lk (Berlin) and mindmeister.com (Vienna and Munich) exist and thrive just as well as US based SaaS providers.
And this is IMHO what Amy Hoy is talking about in her blog post: These were our role models and while I don't think we would have stopped creating letsannotate.com if we wouldn't know about their success stories, it certainly helped to know we weren't the first to step into this unexplored terrain of bootstrapping in continental Europe.
Not that there's a thing with G's or anything, but I think it's pretty clear from the get-go that I've (handpicked) a real mix of speakers, and only half are announced so far!
Additionally, if you want to get a perspective of how these "rockstar" guys act, think, and teach, they have essays online very clearly demonstrating that they do not think like rockstars, or talk like rockstars, but like everyday, thoughtful, smart, friendly people who want to help others succeed:
http://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/11/03/how-to-meet-your-ne...
http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/2009/08/13/donating/
And before you go "OH, well, one of those is a year old and one is almost two" - be serious. These are personal values at stake here, and they don't change overnight. If they had, I wouldn't be inviting these guys to speak.
As for the ROI - well. I can't tell you what ROI you'll get because I can't tell if you're going to sit in the back and read HN comments, or pay attention and take notes. I can't tell if you'll stare at the speakers without working up the nerve to say hello, or if you'll buy them a beer and strike up a conversation. Those things are beyond my control as an organizer.
But I can tell you that there is a tremendous amount of POTENTIAL ROI. That's how we designed the conference.
EDIT: By the way, do you think the only valuable thing is "knowledge"? Cuz I bet you know what you have to do, but you're not doing it. That's not "knowledge" - all you need for "knowledge" is books. But it is something you can get from being around people who are doing exactly what you want to do, and hearing them tell war stories.
We have one speaker, who you've never heard of, who runs more than 3 SaaSes you've undoubtedly heard of. We have another who is just starting his SaaS journey now and I picked deliberately for his approachability. (But all others are living off their products.)
And then, of course, there's me - veteran procrastinator, one SaaS in the world, another couple in the oven, one ebook, multiple training courses, and a veteran speaker of many conferences and former committee member of OSCON.
Trust me - it's not possible that you've put more thought into questioning this type of event than I have.
1. It depends of course. There are millions of conferences and networking events. Some are great, some are terrible. You not only pay a price to attend, you also pay in terms of your time.
2. I always say that networking events pay off with an horizon of about 6 months to a year. Every time I went to an event with a specific, short-term goal, I failed. But amazingly, I bumped into people that I actually wanted to get in touch with eventually. And it helped me later.
3. Another major thing that pays off is the "buzz". When you go to conferences, you hear all the latest stories before they get written anywhere. You are ahead of everyone who didn't show up. Sure, bloggers will cover this or that rumor, but being there and having heard it all gives you an edge. Whether that edge will eventually be valuable depends of course.
Schnitzelconf is didactic. And I don't mean how to pitch to VCs. It's an entirely different worldview, not a networking event, and there will be no rumors. I doubt anyone will hear anything that is hot news. Just solid advice, business sense, war stories, and action steps.
For the record, your friends are extra silly. You know that self-employed people (selbständig) in Austria have social health insurance, pension, and even unemployment coverage?
My husband is selbständig and he even has a part-time employee, all without creating a GMBH. (Don't get me started on how GMBHs are superior to the American LLC!)
My husband is selbständig and he even has a part-time
employee, all without creating a GMBH. (Don't get me
started on how GMBHs are superior to the American LLC!)
I don't think my talk would be welcome, or I would be given the cold shoulder, so I don't put myself through it.
>I don't think my talk would be welcome, or I would be given the cold shoulder, so I don't put myself through it.
Weird. Preach to the converted, much?
And as for preaching to the choir, no. If I were only interested in preaching to the choir, why would I bother to create a fairly controversial conference?
After all, the "accepted" startup model is building, growing huge, and hoping for an acquisition, rather than charging.
But preaching to people who really don't want to hear it - that's another story, and a total waste of time.
What you might be interpreting as disinterest in the subject of startups is more like to be a disinterest in the means by which you are preaching to the converted .. sure you're not just getting a negative personal response and broadly generalizing it to avoid discomfort?
Not everyone - but enough that I wouldn't bother trying to force my unwelcome ideas on people by giving a talk.
And yes, I'm positive it's not "a negative personal response." The people I have connected with clearly enjoy my company.
Some people I've met (like Paul Böhm, which IIRC is the founder of MetaLab) seem very much pro-startup, but it could be that my experience is not representative of the norm, as I am hardly a regular member.
It seems that there is a particular brand of arrogance required of anyone trying to get something new done in the world of The Mob Mind, and that Mob Mind may well already be on its way to agitation in the Metalab scene, with regards to startups .. However, that arrogance persists in the Metalab scene, in the form of others, in the wings, preparing their new ideas for delivery.
In the UK, the minimum contribution is around 20 euros per month. It gives you health coverage (no dental) and you are not forced to pay into the pensions system. In my view, the UK system is hugely more attractive for startups. Ireland is similar I believe.
To be "successful" for a one-man/woman show I'd argue that you need to earn at least €5k a month, after recurring costs for your business, but without taxes/insurance etc.
It's really not that hard to reach that level with the right idea, the right presumptions, lots of work and none of the excuses.
EDIT: Actually, when I first started being "selbstständig" back in 2004 and got a tax consultant, she asked me "how much do you plan to earn per month?", and I said "5000 euros"-- she thought it was a joke. Mindset problem.
The burn rate is very important initially. It can make or break a startup.
Maybe you should write them to tell them that it's not possible without $5,000 of funding for a summer.
On the balance, if you can't manage to figure out ways to save $5k for a summer yourself, you should seriously question whether you have the ability to run a business.
If you can't figure out how to pay for 250 euros a month - which you could earn each week as a dishwasher in Vienna, so it's not as if it's some vast sum - then you are similarly ill-equipped.
If you can't bear to give up one week of your time in order to spend the other 3 weeks on your huge future business, ditto.
By the way: I wrote an ebook to self-fund our work on Freckle and it earned us over $40k. It was sooooooo haaaaaaard. But even then, it was cream - not necessary. We could have kept working on it after hours for free, as we had been doing. It would have taken a bit longer, but so what?
What I'm saying is that paying 20 is more attractive than paying 250. And indeed, I cannot bear to give up 25% of my time just because some socialist government has decided to force me to save for retirement. I do not intend to retire. Ever.
If you don't want to support the socialist government, you should really move to the US.
Your argument has swung from "can't pay the costs" to "hate socialism," while also loving that you can only pay 20 euros a month for basic healthcare.
Which is it? Do you want a very socialist govt to pay 20 euros to? Or do you want none? Do you want health insurance? Or do you want none? Do you want funding so you can live off somebody else's investment in your business, or do you want to not have to pay anything?
a) I think low cost of living is important in the initial stages of a startup. The lower the better. Spending time on anything other than the startup is bad. Dishwasher or other salaries in Vienna are not particularly relevant to understand this principle. Therefore, the UK and Ireland are better places to start a startup than continental Europe.
b) If a significant part of the cost of starting a business comes from mandatory contributions to something I don't want and will never consume (i.e pensions), I get annoyed. You may not know that half of those 250 euros go into pensions and not health care. I want the health care part but I don't want to be forced into a pensions scheme. All contributions should be a share of the income people generate, not a set minimum fee. I have no idea whether that is socialist or not.
c) I'm not as anti-socialist as you might think. My opinion is that society needs to catch people who fall, for practical reasons as well as human dignity. Some things like health care, basic shelter and access to information need to be available to everyone. I don't believe that abject poverty makes people more entrepreneural. The biographies of successful people just don't support that claim. I am willing to pay a share of my income to cover the cost of helping those who cannot help themselves. Unfortunately, in Europe, the people who are best protected by this odd form of socialism are not the ones who have fallen but rather those close to government and traditional trade unions. They don't just cause unnecessary cost, they also create very inflexible rules that discourage self-employment and make it very expensive to hire people.
Having said that, I totally agree with you that none of that should deter anyone from starting a business wherever they may be.
I think a bit part of Austrians having inhibitions about starting their own businesses is as you say, the mindset. And that's what Amy is attacking with the conference. And it will be good! :)
As much as I hate the school system here, I don't think it plays a big part in it, and is used as an excuse to not trying to take some risk (and there is almost no risk!) -- actually, I find it much riskier to NOT BEING YOUR OWN BOSS. Are those friends of yours willing to be someone else's pawn for all their lives? I'm betting they also often complain about how they don't really enjoy their work (at least lots of my employed friends do that). :)
And welcome to the SchnitzelConf club!
I think its the rampant Marxism, frankly. So many brainwashed people in this society think that success = criminal behaviour, and that to be a successful capitalist means you have to be an utter thief. To be fair, the Austrian society has its statistics in this department, which go back to before the Austro-Hungarian empire, and I doubt some dubious American-style hype festival is going to change much about that.
Thus, again, my conference.
And € 250 or € 300 are certainly cheaper than hopping on a flight to london or the states to hear and meet guys like those announced.
And even if I don't manage to learn anything from them (what I don't believe), I can at least deliver some feature requests for balsamiq first hand :-)
Good luck though, hopefully I'm just not your target demographic :)
[1] for a frugal Viennese hacker aiming at ramen (knödel?) profitability, 250 euros is almost 2 weeks' living expenses.
If you want to be successful in business, you've got to learn the idea of investing for returns. 2 weeks' living expenses in exchange for the opportunity to learn from people who've made anywhere between "a very respectable living for one person" to "millions a year" seems worth it to me.
You can listen to their stories. You can walk up to them. You can ask them questions. Do you really think that you're not going to see 250 euros of value for that ticket?
The question of whether to go to a conference, or spend money on a professional designer, or hire an assistant, or outsource some copywriting, or a lawyer... they are all the same question at heart.
To run a successful business, you absolutely have to pay for things. End of story. You cannot do it all yourself. If you need to pay for something, and you don't have the money, you figure out how to earn more so you can pay for the thing and free yourself to earn even more money after that.
Look, I don't care whether you personally come, I'm not making a profit and - more importantly - there are people lining up for that ticket from Denmark, France, Italy, and even Serbia.
I just want you to question your assumptions so that you have a chance of succeeding.
I would like to give you one tip tho:
He not only took his product from spare-time to $2
million, he's also a true mensch!
It means human being or person in German.
I'm not a native Austrian, but was told several years ago by a friend that I shouldn't use that word as people might misunderstand what I meant by it...
Might be a Tyrol thing tho.
If it also means "human" and "wow!" I can't see how I can go wrong.
FTR, I asked my husband, who is Wiener.
Only if you say it in a bad context, with slang, it means sth bad. (but not really whore... more like crazy person) "de oide is so a ménsch!" vs "er ist wirklich ein guter mensch."
As a native german speaker I absolutely read it as positively as it was intended.
Thanks for the heads up on 'mensch.' I know it means 'human' but, asking around, doesn't seem anyone finds it derogatory. The yiddish stays!
In Vienna? HAH AHA HAHAHA HAHA AHHA HAHA HAHA HA HAAA!!!
ROFL
You haven't lived here long.
The one thing I don't like about Vienna is the "meh" attitude, about everything, even what is (theoretically) an individual's own passion. And I believe that's as subject to role modeling as everything else. I am a cheerful, if occasionally overly exuberant, optimist. I fucking care, is what I'm saying.
I don't hold any hopes of changing a lot of people -- but you never know, that could happen. What I want is to attract and meet the people who also feel their passion in an unironic way.
Despite your jabs at my theoretical personality flaws, we clearly agree.
And I'm trying to do something about it.
Just wondering if you've considered the delivery, not the message, is what may be getting in your way here .. I've seen it go both ways, also. If the person has genuine statistics on record of having had a startup success, then no problems: but if the claims are being made without any real basis to back them up, well then .. that can get mighty cold, mighty fast. The hacker elite respect none whose words are mightier than their deeds ..
Thanks for organizing this, Amy. I'm sure it'll be hugely successful.
(Believe me, I would attend did I not happen to live in New Zealand :-)
Sandy
as if it were a bad thing not to have to worry about your medical insurance fucking you up if you get sick...