The MicroConf Europe 2013 Hub Page with all the information can be found here

Speaker: Adii Pienaar (@adii)

WooThemes Today

• 500,000+ Users
• 110,000 Paying Customers
• Starting something new, I became more risk averse

What I was looking for:

• Something that had as little risk as possible
• Something that I could fund myself

Public Beta

• Want to help Entrepreneurs
• Started with only a landing page
• Acquired 2000+ emails in 8 weeks
• Content marketing on adii.me:
  • 10 posts written
  • 8,344 unique visitors
  • 15,977 page views
• First 4 weeks:
  • 2313 Unique visitors (28% conversion from adii.me)
  • 8080 email signups (35% conversion)

Product Validation

• Problems to convert emails to customers with Lunchbox
• Money in the bank is ultimate validation
• Credit Card numbers are 2nd best validation (almost equal to money)
• Plan A: Risk Mitigation (Validating Public Beta has cost $1,000 to date)
• Sell something you can get, but don’t yet have
• Keep it simple stupid (How little could we build?)
• Capture Credit Card details at “sign up”
• Decide on your threshold ahead of time (For Public Beta it was 30 paying customers / +- $1000 monthly recurring revenue)
• Do customer interviews and find out why they paid you

Launching the Product

• all this leads to incredible validation:
  • 47 minutes to process transactions
  • 68 customers
  • $4,000 revenue
  • $2,000 MRR
• Changed the roadmap

Take-Aways

• Being paid is the ultimate validation (in absence of money, credit card details are great!)
• Doing Customer Development with someone that paid you, 10X’s the validity of the feedback (people who don’t pay you tell you a LOT of stuff)
• Deception sucks. Always.
• Your heart should be in the right place
• Startups are about speed and access

-Christoph

The MicroConf Europe 2013 Hub Page with all the information can be found here Speakers: Dan Andrews (@TropicalMBA) / Ian (@AnythingIan)

Get the SOD and a lot more information over here.

Background Story

• Just 2 normal guys back in 2005
• We believed that building a successful business would set us free

Started in 2008

• Pre-Sold equipment for valet agents with no design, no manufacturing
• Now biggest manufacturer of valet equipment
• Then started cat furniture business
• Then started portable bar company
• Now doing ValetUp.com – a SaaS application

Perception of career choice by family

• 2007 – Crazy
• 2008 – Crazier
• 2009 – Lost it
• 2010 – Potentially gone forever
• 2011 – What is it that you do again?
• 2012 – …..

How can we help?

• How we cut our internal email volume by 30-50%
• How you can create a business that serves you instead of the other way around
• How to manage a team of 14 with just a few phone calls a week
• How hiring decision can be easy to make and manage

Excuses not to hire

1. I can’t hire, I’m broke! –> cut back on other things
2. I can’t stand the drama! –> it is less drama than not having a team
3. My cash flow won’t support hiring! –> sell expensive products

Strategic Operating Document

• Mission –> Principles –> Processes
• “dreamy” Mission
• General Operating Principles as a general guideline on how to work the business (e.g. Every customer fault is basically OUR fault)
• Processes spell out exactly how everything works in your business

The Implications Of Working the System

• Before: Only I can do this
• Empowering employees/contractors to do the work
• After: Faster, Better, Cheaper.
• When should we hire? – After writing your SOD the conversation is way easier – you know what it will cost
• Weekly reports:
  • This week’s big initiative
  • Last week’s big initiative
  • KPIs
  • At the same time/day each week

Guerilla Hiring

• Lived on minimum possible salary
• Paid first employees more than we made
• Went to Vietnam (to hire Drupal developers)
• Went to the Philippines (to hire marketing people)
• Realized a lot of people want to travel
• Create a company worth working for…
• Understand cash / time / mobility as a system
• There are people in the world who want to be just like you – make them your apprentice / intern

The mistakes we’ve made

• Thinking somebody else will grow your business for you (Hiring for growth rather than hiring for management)
• Thinking somebody else will care as much as you
• Spending too much time on interns
• Not firing fast enough (implement 90 day review)

5 Things You Can Implement Today

1. Start your SOD document. Build a culture document from day 1. Write the operating system of your business
2. Identify a few ways you could “race” to your first full time hire
3. Write your mission statement
4. Start a habit for writing processes for every repeating task in your business
5. Stop work on repeatable tasks, start working on solving the unknown

-Christoph

The MicroConf Europe 2013 Hub Page with all the information can be found here

Speaker: Mike Taber (@singlefounder)

A few Caveats

• Sales is a Learned Skill
• Sales is a Process
• Sales can be used for Good… or Evil
• It’s NEVER too late to iterate on your sales pitch

Emotional Triggers

• Greed
• Altruism (Red Cross & other NGOs)
• Pride
• Fear (AuditShark – fear of being hacked)
• Envy (People will think I am stupid, if I don’t buy)
• Shame (People will think I’m a douche if I don’t buy)

The Power of First Impressions

• First 0.2 seconds -> First impression
• First 2.6 seconds –> most influential time
• Make sure your copy is great – good first impression
• Website speed matters: +100 milliseconds load-time results in 0.2% lower conversion rate
• “First impressions last forever”
• To overcome first impression, you need to overcome it in multiple contexts

Stop Selling Software

• People don’t buy software, they buy solutions to their problems
  • They buy ways to overcome pain
  • They are outsourcing processes
  • They choose to allow other people to build things they need
  • They don’t prescirbe to the “Not Invented Here” syndrome
• Feature – Benefit – Valued End State (example: buying ski helmet with bluetooth)
  • Billy the kid: Bluetooth – Music/Phone Calls – Self-Esteem
  • Billy’s Mom: Bluetooth – Music/Phone Calls – Peace of Mind (call Billy at any time)
• 2 people you need to pay attention to
  • the ones who just bought your software
  • the ones who just CANCELLED your software

Why are People moving towards your Product?

• Ask new customers:
  • What other things have you tried?
  • Why didn’t those things work?

Iterate on your Startup Pitch

• First Pitch is often aweful
• “Buy a kazoo for a dollar and help Camp Good Days” – problems:
  • What the hell is Camp Good Days
  • Sales pitch is too long
  • People are conditioned to say “No Thanks”
  • Kazoos are worthless!
  • Kazoos in the hands of children are annoying
  • No relationship with the customer (==> you have to be upfront, tell about perks)
• Revised sales pitch: “Would you like to help little kids with cancer? (Just buy a kazoo for a dollar)”
  • No one says “No Thanks” to this anymore
• Bonus: Be a sexist. When approaching couples, talk to the woman (She’ll look at the man and he’ll be under pressure)
• Use Remarketing & Google Adwords
• Talk to people (They love to tell you how much their job sucks)
• Use A/B Testing

Does Website Speed really Matter?

• Yes, but it’s Google’s fault
• It’s a perception issue, NOT a speed issue (Google is fast, so your site should be fast too)
• Reframe Perceptions (“Do you want to search the deep web?” + 1 minute delay makes people value search engine MORE)
• Flight search engines are delayed, because people think that the algorithm works harder for them & value results more
• Sometimes lack of insight into what is going on, makes people angry & leave
• Don’t tell customers how hard you’re working. Show them!
• Change the basis of comparison (Don’t get compared to Google!)

-Christoph

The MicroConf Europe 2013 Hub Page with all the information can be found here

Speaker: Patrick McKenzie (@patio11)

Notes from Patrick’s talk at MicroConf 2013

We were all Newbies once

• In the early years (2005 – 2008) just a nice little bit of money on the side
• Later made enough to quit 9-5 and go entrepreneur
• Then started AppointmentReminder.org – lesson learned: “Only do products that really interest you”

What should I make? (And how will I know that people buy it?)

• B2B or B2C ? —> B2B! B2B! B2B!
  • Easier to get to monthly recurring revenue (MRR)
  • more technical knowledge
  • more money to get out of it
• Find people who don’t love you and ask them whether they would pay for the product!
• Do customer development before you build anything!
• Ask the right questions (“Do you have a missed appointment problem?”)
• Getting email address is next best validation to getting credit card details

Quick Wins To Pay For MicroConf 2014

Fundamental SaaS equation: traffic * conversion_rate * ARPU / churn

• Traffic is hardest to optimize for
• Conversion rate throughout funnel is easier to optimize, but takes weeks/months to see results
• ARPU you can manipulate with a few minutes of work
• Churn: run your own Operation Retention

Charge. More.

• Low prices bring you bad customers
• Killed the $9 plan, added $199 plan for AppointmentReminder.org

Lifecycle-emails for SaaS

• Drip email marketing is often/typically pre-signup, lifecycle emails are post-signup
• Lifecycle emails require more app-specific logic
• Very helpful: good understanding of funnel
• Not required:
  • Lots of volume
  • Great copywriting

Get People to Upgrade To Annual Billing

• Offer discount (1 month free) if they switch
• Offer it to “loyal customers” over email
• One click + confirmation to switch
• Conversion rate from 10% to 25%+
• Immediate revenue of $200 per email sent

Raise your ARPU by upgrading customer to higher tier

• If customer is close to edge of the quota (80%), they might grow anxious
• Suggest them to upgrade to next higher tier (at a discount)

Investigating Low Conversion Rate

• build a dashboard that shows you which customers are failing in using the software (e.g. not setting up any appointment reminders during trial)
• Walk people through the Trial
• set up trial email sequence
  • Day 0: auto-generated welcome
  • Day 3: Personal welcome from me
  • Day 20: if successful sell them hard – if NOT successful extend trial
  • Day 27: “incoming charge”

Weekly Checkup (“Get Them Promoted”)

• High perceived value (everyone likes to hear how much money they made this week)
• Great engagement
• Creates “ongoing earned media” via the option to embed announcemenets/links/etc
• Makes ROI discussions academic

Digging Into Individual Accounts

• If he cancels or has a CC billing failure –> he gets a phone call
• Everybody gets a dunning email, sent three times (i.e. email send when somebody owes you money)
  • Get to the point ASAP
  • Prominent link to capture updated CC data
  • Extend a 3 day grace period, try daily within grace
  • Don’t forget a “You didn’t update so we took the liberty of pausing your account” email

How To Quit Consulting

• Ways to scale consulting:
  • Move your rate up – dramatically
  • improving your utilization
  • Hire people
• Why I really quit?
  • Constant rat race to get new clients
  • Lots of unpaid time
  • You have a boss & you have to go to work every day
• Why not replace with a SaaS ? 
  • Long slow SaaS ramp of death
• So what do we do then? 
  • Productized consulting
    • your most common / most valuable consulting engagement, delivered without the full dance
    • an e-book / video course / etc
    • a training event / seminar / etc
  • Sell it through email
  • Offer it at a variety of price points
  • Make several gigs worth of money in a repeatable, scalable, tweakable fashion
  • most common consulting: “We don’t do email – can you fix it?”
  • Goals for productized consulting: 
    • Teach them how to implement drip marketing & lifecycle emails
    • Market at scale
    • Teach them to do their own copywriting
  • Why would you buy that over consulting?
    • Because it is $500 versus $20,000
    • Because you couldn’t find somebody to do this for you
    • Because you’re not sure you can get it right now
    • Because it’s a cheap, easy way to “test the waters”
  • Why not get it free on the internet?
    • If you pay employees to read information “for free” on the internet, it is no longer free
    • real businesses spend money on problems
    • it reduces roadblocks to adoption within an organization
  • The Key To Marketing it
    • Start building an email list a few months in advance
    • Focused 75% on teaching people stuff (pricing, selling to enterprises, A/B testing, etc) and 25% on telling them about upcoming product
    • Sent two, count’em, two sales emails
    • Sent folks to a long copy page (example)
  • Charge. More.
  • Multiple ways to buy –> multiple ways for best customers to discover ways to pay you more money
  • Partnered with folks with related interests: additional value to customers at vanishingly little work to me
  • Revenue: $64,608

Keys to Product Success

• Email, email, email
• Target a pain which you *KNOW* there is demand for
• Work on your copy!
• Deliver quality products, because you only have one reputation

-Christoph

The MicroConf Europe 2013 Hub Page with all the information can be found here

Speaker: Sherry Walling (@zenfounder)

The Transition Year 2007

• Rob’s transition from employee to entrepreneur
• Sherry gets her residency
• Fighting every evening over whether to get a divorce and how to do it

Lessons Learned from that year

1. Manage anxiety
2. Invest well
3. Go all in

Manage Anxiety

• We didn’t recognize that we weren’t doing well. Too focused on our jobs
• Study: Entrepreneurs are more likely to get prescribed anxiety medication than control group
• Anxiety is:
  • unavoidable
  • (can be) useful
  • (can be) deadly
• Yerkes-Dodson law:
  • low OR high arousal / anxiety leads to poor performance
  • moderate arousal / anxiety leads to great performance
  • Sweet spot is “lower” for high difficulty task than for easy tasks
• Signs of Anxiety
  • Mind won’t stop
  • Muscle tension
  • Digestive problems
  • Sleeplessness
  • Increased heart rate
  • Irritability
  • Feeling frantic, distracted
• Results of Unmanaged Anxiety
  • Damages Creativity, Concentration, Organization, Problem-solving and communication skills
  • Damages health
  • Linked to family violence, addiction, and risk of suicide
  • Too much anxiety for too long is bad for your business AND your life
• How do you know when your anxiety is unmanaged?
  • You can’t shut it off (can’t focus on anything else)
  • Eating more / less
  • Haven’t had sex in two months

Managing Anxiety

• Notice it!
  • Track the metrics (There’s an app for that)
  • Pay attention to your behaviour
• Breathe
  • Anxiety is mainly a body reaction
  • focusing & telling your body it is OK to relax, will actually help
• Double check it
  • Ask yourself “why?” – is it real or are you just getting used to being anxious?
• Solve solvable problems
  • Throw money at solvable problems (house cleaning, babysitter, etc)
• Keep track of what is going well
• Take care of yourself
  • Eat well, sleep regularly, exercise
• Same level of planning needed for personal life as for your business life
• Those that care about you will shoulder the burden too. Emotion is contagious

Pre-Launch Communication

• Why are you doing this?
• What will it cost?
• How much involvement?
• How long do we try?
• Plan B?
• How will you know that you are not successful?
• What about the worst case scenario?
• Book recommendation: “For Better or Work: A Survival Guide for Entrepreneurs and their Families”

Mid-Launch Communication

• Weekly family meeting
• What do each of us need this week?
• How can we solve our solvable problems?
• When is family time?
• Don’t multitask your family

Post-Launch Reassessment

• Take time for important conversations
  • Money
  • Time
  • Vision
  • Roles and expectations
• What is sustainable? What is not?
• Regular “time on your own” about every 6 months: check if you are happy with your life (both entrepreneur + spouse on their own)

Risk Intelligence

• No linear relationship between risk tolerance and entrepreneurial success (Caliendo, Fossen & Kritikos – 2010)
• Persons with low / high risk tolerance are more likely to fail than medium risk tolerance
• Try with smaller numbers, work your way to bigger numbers

Invest in Relationships

• 54% of entrepreneurs have a role model
• 1/3 of the role model users claim that they would not have started their business without this role model
• Master Mind Groups (same ventures, provide mental help for members)
• Invest in others & their dreams (especially your girlfriend / boyfriend)
• Questions to ask yourself:
  • Are you investing in the trust of your partner?
  • Are you investing in your relational network?
  • Are you investing in the dreams of others?
• Don’t put your life on hold indefinitely

Go All In

• Becoming a founder changes everything
• Entrepreneurs enjoy work that fully utilizes their skills and gives them personal autonomy
• Entrepreneurs were less depressed than their 9-5 colleagues
• “The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself” – Michel de
• “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other” – Mother Teresa
• See the big picture

-Christoph

This page is the central ressource for (almost) everything that happened and came out of MicroConf Europe 2013. You will find all the notes I took during the conference as well as blog posts, videos, slides or podcasts from attendees covering MicroConf Europe 2013. I sincerely hope that this is of some value to you – enjoy & execute!

Notes On The Talks

1. Rob Walling: “How to 10x in 15 months“
2. Mike Taber: “How to Sell Anything to Anyone“
3. Andy Brice: “Notes from the Trenches: 8 years of Software Marketing Experiments“
4. Adii Pienaar: “How To Build Any Startups With Zero Budget“
5. Peldi Guilizzoni: “The Tools We’ve Used to Grow From Zero to Seven Figures“
6. Dave Collins: “SEO Demystified: Practical Techniques That Produce Astonishing Results“
7. Sherry Walling: “Don’t Burn-up in the Launch: Staying Emotionally and Relationally Healthy While Launching Your Startup“
8. Dan & Ian: “What Operating System Powers Your Business“
9. Patrick McKenzie: “Building Things To Help Sell The Things You Build“

Blog Posts Relating To MicroConf Europe 2013

•  Notes from MicroConf 2013 in Las Vegas
• Mario Rozensky’s summary post about MicroConf Europe 2013 (Czech!)
• MicroConf Prague – a Catalyst to Business Sucess by Charlie Irish
• The long term MicroConf effect by Anders Thue Pedersen

Podcasts Relating To MicroConf Europe 2013

•  TropicalMBA Episode 48: What Makes a Great Conference Talk?
• Startups For The Rest Of Us #155: 6 Key Take-Aways from MicroConf Europe 2013
• Our Own Little Accelerator #11: Interview about MicroConf

-Christoph