Leveling up - Patrick McKenzie - MicroConf Europe 2015 Talk Recap

The MicroConf Europe 2015 Talk Recaps can be found on the central “hub” page.

Website: starfighters.io
Twitter: @patio11
Slides:

Talk Recap

Everything we do: It’s all about the family
- optimize for it, NOT for business results
Flying Geese
- From dirt poor country to really rich country
- developing economy: dirt poor, not able to do anything
- start industry anyone can do: textiles
- take educated workforce, infrastructure improvements from textiles industry and build refining steel industry
- repeat and level up to automobile industry
- take what you learn from automobile and re-invest into software/robots/aircraft/etc industry
Flying Geeks
- Bingo Card Creator –> Kalzumeus –> Appointment Reminder –> Starfighter

Tutorial mission: Your first business
- Ship it. Ship it. Ship it. Ship it. Ship it. Ship it. Ship it.
- Optimize for learning over perfection
- start accumulating unfair advantages for later businesses
- Cover “minimum viable financial goal”
How you know it’s an advantage?
- People tell you you’re anomalously good
- Watch other people around you in community. Note where you’re doing good on something useful.
- Use your growing understanding of your business to project what X would do in another, larger business, or a business with advantages you lack
- When you find your superpower: Exploit the heck out of it!
The case against SaaS for Biz #1
- huge barriers to shipping and keeping it in the market
- Hard to sell and market without any pre-existing foothold in industry
- Long slow SaaS ramp of death
  - took 6 months to get to $400 MRR
The Glide Path To SaaS
- Plant a flag on the market with an e-book, WordPRess plugin, etc
- Start collecting email addresses
- Launch a productized consulting business
- Gradually titrate up the amount of software offered
Typical Bootstrapped SaaS Pricing
- $29 – $49 – Tier 1, some foozles
- $99 – Tier 2, even more foozles, maybe a feature
- $249 – Tier 3, much more foozles, all them features
Productized Consulting Base Offering
- $99/mo: SaaS application to do pricing pages
- $500/mo: Savvy pricing pages as a service
- $2.5k to $10k++/mo: Chief Revenue Officer
- This is aspirational pricing!

Deciding when it’s time to move on
- Business not helping you achieve goals (Live/love/Learn)
- You’ve stopped accumulating marginal advantages
- It’s “clearly time to go.”
Options for pruning portfolio projects
- shut it down
- Put it into maintenance mode
- Sell it
Anatomy of a sellable business
- Goldilocks zone for revenue/price
- Low ongoing time involvement from founder
- Low-risk that present revenue evaporates
- Growth in market
- Technical risk mitigated
Starfighter
- Online games (CTFs) engineers play, for fun, by programming
- We passively identify skilled engineers
- We contact them and ask about background/goals
- If appropriate, introduce them to hiring managers
- If they take a job, we earn a commission
- Where is this “leveling up?”
  - Trusted relationship with co-founders
  - Scale of technical ambition
    - BCC = “Hello World with random number generator”
    - Starfighter = Stock market with C compiler
  - BCC Investment: $60. Starfighter: …
  - Does Starfighter pass The Peldi Test? HECK, YES!
Starfighter Lows
- Morderous Crunch To Ship
  - Ignored family to make deadline
- Technical Scope
  - 10x technical complexity in a new business: good. We did 100x…
- Promised a Ship Date
  - never promise a ship date, because you are going to break it
- Founder Communication Issues