Building Stuff To Help You Sell The Stuff You Build | Hacker News Reader

Building Stuff To Help You Sell The Stuff You Build

slideshare.net

95 pointsurlwolf25 comments

Personally I'd suggest you guys wait until they post the video and I transcriptify it, since the talk is better than the slide deck, but if you absolutely HAVE to read something this morning then skip to the section marked "Quick Wins for SaaS businesses" and look for the five bits of advice with big ugly yellow stars next to them.

If you have questions, I'd be happy to... board a 12 hour flight back to Japan in approximately 5 minutes. Feel free to ask me over email some other day.

5 minutes have elapsed. I didn't think HN still operated without patio11...

Have a good flight back home, Patrick. It has been a pleasure to meet you in real life. Thanks for all the information you shared and for entertaining us at the buffet. Those stories were gold :-)

OT: Attended patio11 and Colins email bootcamp, was excellent. Had to share this.

Last year's complete transcript and video: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2013/04/24/marketing-for-people-who...

Your link is from his Microconf 2012 talk, where the OP's link on Slideshare is from the talk he did this year, a few days ago.

Complete notes from all Microconf 2013 talks (including Patrick's, Jason Cohen's, mine) are here: http://www.it-engelhardt.de/microconf-2013-hub-page/

Videos should be available in a few months.

Jason Cohen, Erica, and Rob Walling all delivered probably in the top 5 of talks I've ever seen for SaaS founders. The notes can't do them justice but they ROFLstomp the utility of anything you'll read on the Internet this week. (Obviously, mad props to the attendee who took it upon himself to take notes for you all.)

Hey Erica. Thanks for sharing the link and for the incredible talk you delivered. I learned a lot from your talk and from listening in on you guys talking at the buffet. Wish you all the best with your rebranding efforts from WooshTrafic to Marketvibe!

PS: I now know that I'm missing a 'h' :-)

Erica, loved your talk. Thank you for taking the time to give at MicroConf. Looking forward to reviewing the video once they are all out...

That is the (excellent) 2012 Microconf talk. This link is the 2013 slideshow.

Here are some great quotes from the same event:

http://www.it-engelhardt.de/memorable-quotes-from-microconf-...

Is there / will there be a recording available online?

I believe Patrick always posts at least a complete transcript of these talks on his blog.

Yes, LessFilms recorded all the talks. No idea what the turnaround time will be. IIRC, last year it took 6+ months to get online.

MicroConf was AMAZING. If you haven't seen Patrick speak, you really need to. And you still have a chance to this month in Philadelphia: http://baconbiz.com

I think, that it is a marketing thing as well. You just don't want to put out the videos shortly after the conference, because of all the people who paid $700+ to attend. They might feel betrayed and appreciate having a bit of a head start.

Agreed - I am actually building my own CMS which I really really need to use to launch my blog Real Soon Now.

So its OSS, which may or may not be a good idea, but this does beg the question - how much of my needs are likely to replicate into the communities needs or is it just worthwhile for everyone sticking with their own me-ware for now?

Let me rephrase that to see why the downvotes

I like patio11's approach and agree we should write our own business systems to meet our particular need - I am finishing off a CMS that I have also opensourced (it's text and templates and cookies for tracking, about 100 lines)

Now I am not promoting that codebase, only releasing it cos I don't want to waste a GitHub private repo. But I do wonder if we should all write our own CMS / mailchimp / an tester or if we should community build them or just roll up packages

Partly I am asking what are the common functions we should all have a custom builds and partly where do we draw the line on build vs "buy"

What I need and what is almost impossible to find is a good Autoresponder email system with a template editor, a few stats and basic list management/segmentation.

The catch: I must be allowed to self-host. This is almost impossible to find since everybody seems to rely on 3rd party email services.

Thats what I am saying - why must you self-host, and is that need so great and shared by enough that you will write your own (a few hours with the python email library, or weeks of work, whichever it is)

Oy. Do NOT self-host an email autoresponder. I wrote a great comment about this a few years ago on Brian Armstrong's blog--and he's now doing Coinbase after deciding the email stuff wasn't worth it.

Look in my profile to see who I am and why I'd say this, but as a quick summary, I have years of experience and have also helped companies set up autoresponders that do over 1M emails a day, and that's exactly why I say this. It is a clusterf*ck and a rabbit hole a mile deep and a mile wide. Pay the money (or in Mailchimp's case, don't pay any money until you get bigger.) It is worth EVERY penny.

By the way, any good autoresponder (I use Mailchimp and Aweber and like them both for different purposes) will let you easily export/back up contacts, and none of the big companies are going anywhere.

Thanks, I'll check it out. Do you happen to know the blog post title? Since comments are loaded via Disqus, I can't search for them with Google :(

Ah, finally found it! http://brianarmstrong.org/blog/my-next-project/ Ctrl-F 'Erica' and read the whole thread of him/me! :) (He did launch the biz, but shut it down not long after that. Coinbase is doing much better! ;)

Thanks for taking the time to find the blog post. I definitely need to reconsider whether or not self-hosting is such a good idea or not.

Do you want to become an expert in email deliverability, DNS, bounces, white listing, DKIM, SPF?

Or do you want to sell your product?

It boils down to that. Spend your time doing what you are GREAT at and what you WANT to do. Are you great at email deliverability? Do you want to spend your time becoming an expert on that? Probably not.

I know how to change the oil in my car. I know how to mow my lawn. I know how to clean toilets. I don't do any of those things because they are a huge waste of my time that is better spent elsewhere. Same thing goes here.

Agree! (& listen to Erica, she knows what she's talking about)

Deliverability is a nightmare (client of mine lost 5 figures, because his admins [at Germany's biggest hosting company] messed up the DNS setup).

There's a reason why there are so many companies doing email delivery as a service (SendGrid, MailGun, Postmark - to name a few)

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