Patio11 on his 362 day work year & what he does in his break
businessofsoftware.org
businessofsoftware.org
Can we be successful without doing the hard sales thing? Is it getting worse or am I just getting more sensitive to it? That's an honest question, shlock like this just makes my skin crawl these days, but maybe I'm in the minority.
Don't dig for gold, sell shovels! Want to learn how to sell shovels? Subscribe to our newsletter where we teach you 3-4 things and then end up with us trying to sell you on stuff that will help you selling shovels.
Next thing you know, you are paying for 50 different services so you can "focus on selling shovels"
This also applied to programming books in the 90's. Buy another O'reilly book when you hadn't even gotten to the 3rd chapter in the previous O'Reilly book. And spend time browsing for the next book about something when you hadn't even begun to understand or master the previous thing.
Going even further back this wasn't that much of a problem though. There were very few bookstores that carried computer books (I had to drive to the Princeton U bookstore) and when you got there there might have been 1 or 2 books on a subject so you couldn't get distracted with unlimited content and information.
The line that stood out for me was "Nuremberg, Germany... [is] a bit far away from the tech-industry in-crowd". Nuremberg's a 1 hour flight from Berlin & 1 hour by train to Munich, both of which have vibrant tech/startup scenes. That line didn't ring true to me, so that's where I archived the email & moved on.
If your definition of "success" doesn't include selling software, then sure, you can be a success without selling software.
But BoS is a conference about the business of software – hence the name – and sales is a primary concern for BoS attendees, because that's the whole point of the software business. The competitive advantage of software is that you only have to build it once. (And, if it's well-written, it costs as little to maintain as possible.) Then you sell it as many times as you can. That's what our professional pursuit of "scalability" is really about: The more "scalable" the product, the less time a company needs to spend worrying about how much work the software can do and the more time the company spends trying to convince people to give the software more things to do. The ideal software company would spend 100% of its time thinking about sales and customer satisfaction and 0% of its time thinking about software.
If you or your peers are noticing sales happening more often, it may be because you're becoming more aware of how the software business actually works. You'll need to figure out how to cope with this knowledge. You can choose to embrace it. Or you can choose to avoid working in the software business, which is easy to do. (Most programming jobs are not part of the software business, and even those that are often have nothing to do with the strategic side of the business. Though, I have to warn you, once you've learned to see the strategic side of the software business it is hard to un-see. And the power to change the real world at scale is addictive and is not lightly discarded.)
That ceiling is around 100 USD an hour. It may vary geographically but its really a ceiling.
And guess what, on my little business park where I have an office, the owners of many of the businesses do not experience that ceiling. They sell.
I like their nice cars. I want one too. So I am learning to sell.
I also have "The Little Schemer" open next to me, and dream of the time when children learn the 4 r's - reading, 'riting, 'rithmetic and recursion.
Just because I want to sell, does not mean I am abandoning my principles or my profession. I hope to contribute further. But I want to be more secure, and earning more will help that a lot.
Work should be fun, interesting, challenging, and something that you can put away occasionally to do other things. If you can't, you're doing it wrong.
We also happen to believe that far too many people spend their time as entrepreneurs telling other people how hard they work etc, and that frankly is not healthy. This is also a little 'tongue in cheek'.
This is OT but I have mixed feelings about the practice of using someone's first name when responding to them on HN. On one hand, it's a bit e-stalky, especially when the handle bears no resemblance to the name and just... sound off. On the other, it's a rather elegant, understated way of distinguishing comments made in some more or less official capacity from regular opinions.
[ed] Is this more effective at attracting the kind of people who pay to attend the BoS conference than his usual voice?
I know, I know - They rented a hotel ballroom and give you lunch and snacks. It's too bad the self-organizing bar-camp thing kind of died when the great recession ended. I thought it might kill expensive conferences like Craigslist killed newspaper classifieds.
Please don't forget we have a relatively high ticket price a finite number of places and very significant fixed and variable costs. This is not a software business.
We also try hard to incentivize early booking and offer discounts to encourage this so the average ticket price is significantly lower than $2,500. (Tickets cost $1,800 at the moment and we have sold almost 3/4 of them.
We can be shocked and complain about the price, or we can say, hmm, maybe there's something to this "provide demonstrably great value and charge an appropriate price for it" idea... ;)
Given that many speakers are doing so to contribute back to the community and build their own reputations it would be nice if conferences like BoS would be run by the community for the sake of the community rather than by commercial entities.
I'd be curious to know what percentage of the video sales price goes to the speakers as royalties.
If you have been to BoS you would know how community minded it is. It takes a huge amount of work to put something like BoS on and to be honest, we think we do a pretty good job of hosting and producing an event that is both very different and refreshingly uncommercial in outlook.
If it's a case of the event not being financially sustainable without additional non-ticket revenue then maybe charging for videos is what has to be done, but if the videos aren't bringing in a significant revenue stream while presumably significantly reducing the number of viewers I'd have to ask if that's a worthwhile trade-off ?
Obviously the answer for that is going to be different if you're optimising for profit or for community benefit, but that's why I'd rather have community events run sustainably by non-profits than on a purely commercial for-profit basis.
[I have no issues with videos being charged for / with-held at the speakers request though]
In most cases they are though we may get asked to not release a video to the public if a speaker has said something that they wish they hadn't, in one case a speaker discussed a company that they then started teaching an MBA class on and realized that the students could just watch the video instead of doing the classes, someone was once very unintentionally indiscreet about a co-founder and some investors...
We try to respect the wishes of the speakers.
I think this is one of the best talks I ever watched. It's about startup life, without glamour, false-hope or delusional expectations. The fact that it's not a twenty-something year old guy, who sold it's business for millions of dollars in only 2 months, makes an excellent talk to anyone who has a SaaS software, consultancy business or is looking in join the startup bandwagon.
In month 1, we have 1 * C companies. In month 2, we have 1 * .978 * C companies. .978 is the survivorship rate, which is the inverse of the churn. In month 3, we have 1 * .978 * .978 * C companies.
Given that we are most keenly interested in how many company-months we rack up over time, we can solve for this with sum of an infinite geometric series. The formula is C / (1 - s) for s is the survivorship rate, or C / (churn).
Exactly like Gail said it was.
the survivorship rate, which is the inverse of the churn
More logical I think would be SR = (1-churn). Of course, .978 is close enough to 1.0 that it doesn't matter, and I don't understand how the grandparent arrived at 32 months.
Edit: your two formulas for total company-months also imply that sr = (1-churn), so maybe I'm missing something?
With this definition, a churn of 0.75 is a survivorship of 0.25.
You're perhaps being misled by the offhand phrase "the survivorship is the inverse of the churn"; in that sentence "inverse" is not being used in the mathematician's strict sense of "reciprocal", but in the more colloquial sense of "a thing that moves in the opposite direction from the previous thing".
None of us understand where 32 months came from.
Brilliant!
Also, this is more controversial, but I think patio11 should make his points faster. His posts tend to be overly long for what they bring to the table.
Probably all of us struggle to see where on the continuum of [stereotypical hacker who fears sunlight] to [real estate agent that also writes code] we lie, and what sort of job/career/ambition we best fit into.
Both great movies though :)
Matias, this phenomenon is known as the “Eisenberg Uncertainty Principle.” A movie fan cannot know whether a character is played by Jesse Eisenberg or Michael Cera with any degree of confidence until he observes the whole movie. This is because the parts played by these two actors can only be accurately modeled by a complex wave-like function. Cinematic physicists are not sure, but it seems likely that, for any given movie, the part of the geeky outcast is played by both Jesse Eisenberg and Michael Cera simultaneously. Only when you watch the movie does the waveform collapse and you observe one or the other actor.