When I first joined the BoS team last year and was told about the Lightning Talks I was startled. I thought that Lightning Talks would be a contradiction in terms for the reserved and introverted software crowd. As soon as I started watching the first talk I was hooked – I have so much time for the folks going for it. There were a lot of great stories to be told and shared. Even better, code-writers were brilliant at doing Lightning Talks, because writing code is in fact about being concise, precise and to the point.

If you went down to the Business of Software Conference site today to register for our Super Early Bird, you would have been in for a big surprise. The site was down and we were getting no email from early this morning. The Business of Software website was not there. We didn’t notice as we were all doing stuff in the morning.

If you went to the site, I want to offer you a total, absolute and unreserved apology.

We should not have let you seen a GoDaddy holding page. I am sorry.

Over 7 years ago, when Neil set Business of Software up, GoDaddy seemed like a reasonable choice for a domain name registrar. We didn’t know about Danica Patrick sponsorships, elephant hunting or the art of crass up-selling that it would become. We also didn’t realise that the email address that Neil used to register the site was no longer in use. We had an automatic update of the domain name, and it wasn’t until the very day, March 14th, that the domain registration expired (as the original credit card used to pay for the domain was now out of date), that we had any idea – because the site was now parked. When I let Neil know, he was on a plane on the runway, about to take off. He sent one email…

Huge thanks to Lucy Boyes at Red Gate who was heroic in digging out old passwords and keeping calm as the CEO of Red Gate Software pushed her around their office dressed as a King, forcing her to eat cheese while she dealt with a very panicked me on the phone – they are a special company. Thanks also to the very wonderful support team at WP Engine for helping us get back online so quickly. Yes, those panicked calls really weren’t a wind up, I was that clueless and you were brilliant. Thank you.

I am genuinely humbled by the number of incredible, extraordinary people who agree to share their stories and life lessons at the Business of Software Conference over the years. I know how much effort, thought and energy goes into each and every one of those talks and I can’t think of one that I didn’t take something very meaningful from. It is tempting to bring back all of the speakers from previous years – and indeed we are often implored to do so by some of our regular attendees – but we also want to be able to give other people a chance to share their knowledge.

We want to be a place where exceptional people share exceptional lessons about running software businesses. We want to be able to break new speakers with new perspectives and we go to considerable lengths over the course of the year to find and curate great content. We want to optimise on quality across a number of topics so while we could fill 12 slots with brilliant people talking about software marketing, that obviously wouldn’t provide enough time to cover all the other things we want to discuss.

The hardest thing we do every year is say, ‘No, not this time’, to brilliant people. (This is slightly countered by how easy it is to say, ‘No, please don’t contact us again’ to some of the more random speaker agents out there!).

We tried to put some rules in place to help guide our thoughts and we came up with these. (And yes, rules are there to be broken, I am an entrepreneur after all).

1. We want half of the speakers to have not spoken at Business of Software Conference previously.
2. We will limit speakers, unless extraordinary things happen (and they do), to speaking at two consecutive conferences though we want to explore other ways of keeping great people involved.
3. We don’t want ‘sea gull speakers’. One of the best things about BoS is the speakers typically stick around to hang out. We don’t want that to change. One speaker who we really want to get to speak this year agreed though then said they would not be able to make it until the last day. They then suggested that they speak next year as they wanted to take part in the whole event. This made us think they were very cool, and also made us think about how we can help speakers and our attendees get more from the whole experience. More on that later.
4. What should rule 4 be?
5. We will almost certainly change the ‘rules’ as we go along.

We would be interested in your thoughts – either in the comments, or by email.

This is a quick set of the most popular questions flying in through the door at BoS Towers over the last couple of weeks.

Are we accepting speaker proposals?

Yes. BUT PLEASE PAY CAREFUL ATTENTION TO THESE GUIDELINES. We get about 10 approaches a day and we simply don’t get the time to respond to them all. We are incredibly fortunate to have had such brilliant speakers over the years and this means we get approaches from all sides to talk. BoS is unusual in that we don’t measure the value of the event on the number of speakers we have. I had a breathless email from the organiser of another event recently boasting there would be over 60 speakers on the main stage in a single day, my first thought was, ‘Meh’. You get 6 hours of speaking in a conference day and it takes 2 minutes to get someone on stage, introduced and settled, then each speaker gets an average of 4 minutes to tell the audience how much venture capital they have raised, how amazing their company is and how they are, ‘Crushing It’, so there isn’t too much time for useful insights. Maybe that’s just me but we work very hard to curate long form content that is actionable, interesting and makes you think.

Would we be interested in a guest blog post?

Probably if you have an interesting point of view, understand what BoS is about and have something relevant to say. If you want to recycle a press release or just generate link-baity content spam, please don’t expect a reply. Sorry. And no, we don’t do product launches, recycle press releases or other nonsense. Contact Zuly @ BusinessofSoftware.org if you have an interesting idea.

Will we be doing scholarships and two-for-one deals this year?

I don’t honestly know. It will depend on whether we have some support from sponsors (see below). Two-for-one deals are something that we have done on a limited basis for a few startups in partnership with supporters in the past. I hope that we can do so again but this will depend on that support being forthcoming. While the price of a ticket is not cheap, we would make a significant loss on a ticket if we funded this ourselves and we want this event to be sustainable for the long term benefit of the community. Any startup deals we do offer would be very restricted in their scope, i.e. not open to previous recipients, not open to venture funded companies, not open to companies that have been going for more than a year. We totally recognise the value of bringing fresh people into the community, but we also have to do that in a sustainable way.

Can we sponsor the Business of Software Conference?

Possibly. We sure could do with some help in making the event sustainable in the long term but we will not compromise on the quality of the program or the experience of the delegates. Last year we were offered a sponsorship of $50,000 by an advisory firm to sponsor the event and all they wanted was to run a panel discussion. This isn’t what Business of Software is about.

Some things we would happily consider:

• Sponsoring a social event – we run a reception on the Sunday night at registration (drinks and snacks) and we also have a great social evening on the Monday evening where we buy out a venue close to the conference for dinner and drinks.
• Sponsoring a lunch or breakfast and this would allow you to get something in front of all of the participants in the event as they sit down to eat.
• Sponsoring a speaker slot (though only a speaker that we have announced, we will not offer a platform to a speaker that a sponsor has chosen).
• Sponsoring attendance for others. (See above)
• Sponsoring delegate gifts – only nice ones though – we don’t like those ‘goody bags’ that are filled with rubbish.
• Meaningful discounts on software (i.e. don’t offer a 30 day free trial when you offer everyone a 30 day free trial).

If you are interested in sponsoring, please remember that you will be getting in front of one of the most influential groups of people in the software industry. They are discerning people and they are very loyal, high value, customers for the right products and services. If you have the right product or offer to put in front of them, we are open to discuss how we can help do that but honestly, seriously, truly, don’t expect to put rubbish in front of them for free. (You know who you are…) Contact me directly if you are interested.

This is a guest post by Jennifer Rullmann. Jen is a developer-turned-entrepreneur based in the Washington, D.C. area.  Her company makes Convey, software that plugs friendly, cost-saving user guides into your application with very little effort.  She blogs about creating delightful companies and software at Software Smitten.

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Every startup begins life with infinite choices, and there never seems to be enough information when we need to make a decision .  To deal with this we pick up a compass to help make sense of things.  Some compasses are big – like Lean Startup – and others are smaller, like Customer Lifetime Value.

I use many compasses in my startup, but the first and most important of these is happiness.  We all start companies in a quest for control over our own happiness.  We want to control our income to open more doors in life, or control over building the product just right, or control for when and where we work.  Ultimately, we want to be happy, so happiness should be the central idea that the rest of the business revolves around. Let’s discuss a few examples of business decisions where happiness can be your compass.

Writer’s note: I wrote about this topic previously, explaining why I had designed my business in the way that I did.  This post is meant to be a more generic exploration – it’s not necessary to read my previous attempt at articulating the concept.

B2B vs B2C

Selling to businesses is fundamentally different from selling to consumers.  An enlightening exercise is to think about pricing: how much are consumers willing to spend on an intangible software product?  Typically, not much.  Lower pricing means that you need a lot more customers to build that million-dollar business while simultaneously lowering the amount you can spend acquiring an individual customer.  Scalable marketing becomes paramount.  Bootstrapping becomes harder.

Here are some contrived examples of how this decision may impact your day-to-day life:

• After convincing a lead to purchase your product, your lead has to convince her boss
• You’re trying to get on TechCrunch
• You’re trying to get on LifeHacker
• Your leads visit your website multiple times over a period of months before deciding whether to purchase
• Your leads glance at your app page for a few seconds while waiting for the movie to start before deciding whether to purchase
• You go to a lot of industry events and conferences
• Your business depends on your customers telling all their friends about you
• You spend a lot of time cold-calling leads

Further reading on this topic:

• How B2B Product Marketing is Different from B2B
• How Sales Complexity Impacts your Startup’s Viability
• The New Breed of B2B Buyer (there is also a part two and three)
• The Self-Service Limit in B2B Sales (my favorite section of part three)
• Meet the New Enterprise Customer, He’s a Lot Like the Old Enterprise Customer

Sales Model

A lot of startups seem to stumble into a sales model.  They often copy the strategy of a highly visible success story, blindly following their hero’s strategy without understanding why it works.  Others build a product and then guess what their customers would be willing to pay for it.  Handing off this decision to chance is a mistake, because your average selling price  has a huge impact on your business.

Joel York says it best in his excellent blog post Three SaaS Sales Models:

This grid compares your average selling price to the cost of acquiring (CAC) and servicing (TCS) a customer.  It illustrates how pricing impacts the rest of your business.  For example, if you price your start-up low, then it is absolutely essential that you utilize cheap marketing tactics to keep your customer acquisition low, and that you engineer your product so that new customers are onboarded automatically, with no expensive manual work.

Here are some contrived examples of the impact pricing has:

• You spend a lot of time trying to attract cheap traffic through inbound marketing tactics (blog posts, podcasts, etc)
• You spend a lot of time talking directly to customers, understanding their problems and providing comprehensive solutions
• Most of your customers come from adwords
• Most of your customers come from cold-calling and emailing
• Your mailbox is flooded with support requests from your ‘free tier’ customers
• You spend months on a single sale

Further reading on this topic:

• Three SaaS Sales Models
• SaaS Customer Lifetime Value Drives SaaS Company Value
• Which is Better: Many Customers at Low Price-Point or Few at High Price?
• How to Price Software Without Just Rolling the Dice

Market Positioning

In their hugely influential book ‘The Descipline of Market Leaders’, Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema argue that all market leaders, regardless of their industry, can be classified into one of these three categories: Operational Excellence, Innovation, and Customer Intimacy.  Basically, you can offer a product at the lowest overall price to the customer, a string of innovative products, or world-class support.  Many markets have room for leaders in each of these categories, so if you’re in one of these markets, the choice is up to you.  Each requires tuning the operations and culture of the company in a different way.

Some contrived examples of the impact market positioning has on your company:

• You spend most of your time talking to customers in person or on the phone, understanding their problem and offering tailored solutions
• You hire the best programmers, give them expensive laptops and free lunches
• You develop a frugal, do-more-with-less attitude at your company
• You get mentioned in a lot of ‘amazing customer support’ blog posts
• Your amazing product is being copied by your competitors – but you’re not worried because you’re about to release an even better product
• Your low prices are resetting customer expectations and putting your competition out of business

Further reading on this topic:

• The Discipline of Market Leaders
• Circuit City Goes Bust: Zappos Flies High — Why?
• The Anatomy of Operational Excellence
• Big Macs vs. The Naked Chef
• Ben and Jerry’s vs. Amazon

Take Away

Each of these three decisions – B2B vs B2C, pricing strategy, and market positioning, help you to narrow down the myriad of choices available to your company.  They are tools, effective in helping you spend your brain power where it matters.

Choices made in one of these decisions can impact the others – for example, if you are a customer intimacy company, then you probably can’t afford to offer lower prices than your competition.   Pick the decision that you feel strongly about and let it narrow down your choices from there.

Thank you to Under 30 CEO and to Clarity for recognising Business of Software Conference as a quality, must-attend, event for software entrepreneurs. We love running Business of Software and we know people love coming but it is always rather wonderful to be rewarded with some attention. Hugely appreciated by all of us who work on the programme over the year and also by everyone who has supported our growth over the years. Thank you.

Under 30 CEO asked the question. ‘What is one under-the-radar startup or business conference that young entrepreneurs shouldn’t miss in 2013 and why?‘

To be named at number one in a list that includes DLD, Microconf, FailCon, LaunchCon and other great events is a huge honour.

Dan Martell at Clarity produced a list of ‘Top North American Conferences for entrepreneurs‘.

It is a longer list covering all sorts of great events and he certainly doesn’t say you should go to them all but it is another great list.

And by the way, the more observant of our readers may detect from the subtle differences in spelling in some of these posts (we prefer to spell things correctly :-)) that strictly speaking, we are not a North American Conference. Though we are held in Boston, we are based in (real, original) Cambridge, UK and in fact, over half of the attendees at Business of Software Conference come from outside the United States so we are a pretty international event which is one of the things that makes our community so interesting.

This is a guest post by Paul Pedrazzi. Paul is a novice coder, aspiring designer, and professional product manager at companies like PeopleSoft, Taleo and Oracle. Paul blogs at http://craftedresonance.quora.com.

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The Business of Software is easily my favorite conference of the year. It is held annually in Boston. The next event is October 28–30, 2013, you can register here.

Registration for BoS 2013 is open but please note we had almost 650 attendees last year but this year there will be a maximum of 400. 

“Why aren’t we making it bigger this year? You will easily sell the tickets.”

Someone recommended a book, Small Giants: Companies that choose to be great instead of big to me on the way home from BoS last year.

It got us thinking – hard.

How can we scale craft?

BoS has more than doubled in size in the past two years but we want to run the best conference in the world, not the biggest.

Simply, the Seaport is more intimate but it does not have the capacity of a larger, more corporate space, so we are going to be selling fewer tickets. Capacity this year is 400 people. (We had 650 guests last year). We want to keep BoS special for our guests. The Seaport is a more intimate venue, making it easier to have the ‘accidental’ but inspiring conversations that are central to the BoS experience. We want to be profitable, but we also want to make sure that we serve the community we have built. Please don’t wait: they are likely to sell out. You will also see a few other developments over the course of the year as we gear up for the seventh Business of Software Conference. Can’t wait to let you know about them.

We hope to see you at BoS 2013.

Blessed are the disruptors (pirates) for they shall be less of a pain in the backside than the incumbents (bandits) who can get into all sorts of nasty little habits. Here is our experience at Business of Software for having a phone number so sales people can call us and make terrible pitches for products we would never want in a million years (this = 99% of all calls in past three years).

Here is my personal view of two providers of providers of a really simple thing – a telephone number.

They are rated on 3 things – price, cancellation policy, how they made me feel. Not very scientific but I don’t care, if companies and software can make me feel such extremes of emotion, I feel free to share my feelings.

JConnect (No link given, not getting any Google Juice from us).

Neil set this account up in 2007 when it was literally the only option available SO I AM NOT BLAMING HIM TOTALLY, COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY FOR THIS. 🙂

Pricing (Not very obvious from their website, they really prefer you speak to a sales adviser to set this up)

Monthly cost of two telephone numbers = £20.92 (about $30 per month).

We usually have about 5 minutes of inbound calls on this number per month. The last time we got a fax was in 2009.

Cancellation

It is almost impossible. Seriously.

You know you are probably not doing business with the right sort of company when, if you Google, ‘How do I cancel a jConnect Account’, this is what you see. (Warning: contains swear words).

Wow. I tried to cancel the account a month ago when the credit card that was sucking our money out every month ran out. I ended up speaking to customer services (only took 40 minutes or so waiting for them to answer the phone). They were marginally helpful –  need to make sure the account is active and has a valid credit card open in order to make amendments. Oops, they forgot to say that you cannot make the one amendment I wanted to – cancel the account – even though I had told them this is what I wanted to do. And now they have a new valid card number. And you can’t change it, cancel it or do anything else with it apart from spend more money on new numbers with them.

Despite emails, calls etc, we are still being billed, the sales guys are still calling (my favourite is the one who calls once a week to speak to, ‘Mr Joel at Software Business’ as she wants to offer her company’s services for web and mobile development. Good luck with that an all…).

I called my credit card company and report their behaviour and dispute the charges. This will take up to 60 days and the credit card company cannot stop any future payments they take, they will also ahve to be disputed in the same process. So I eventually I bit the bullet and worked out the quickest way to cancel.

It is simple, I just called up my credit card company to report my card as lost. All payments from that card will stop. Then I simply wait a few days for my new credit card to arrive and when it does, I will simply go to the accounts that we have for things like Amazon, web hosting, CRM systems, email, domain registration. There is only 32 monthly charges with different companies so it will only take a couple of hours to update.

How did this make me feel?

I want this company, (NASDAQ listed) to die. I want the executives and the investors to suffer bad things (not like horrible illness or death or anything like that, just an endless series of really annoying and inconvenient mishaps that they end up knowing are all down to their shoddy, unethical behaviour. Added bonus would be if they also knew that I had some karma related part in it). I would amused to hear that someone had scratched, ‘Rip Off Scamsters’, on every high performance car in their executive parking lot (DO NOT DO THIS. I AM NOT ADVOCATING IT AS A COURSE OF ACTION). I feel sorry for their other customers. I am left with a horrible sense that I am dealing with thieves. (Of course, I am sure that they are in fact wonderful upstanding citizens), but that is how they made me feel.

VS

Twilio

Pricing

$1 per month for a number we get to choose. We chose 1 (267) 282-6736 largely because if you write it (+1 BoS at BOS DO)

$0.01 per minute for inbound calls. (This number is so low that there is no GBP equivalent)

Cancellation Policy

Google ‘twilio cancellation policy‘

Don’t want it, switch it off any time. No charge. Done.

How does this make me feel?

Then, I send a note to technical support asking for some help on something, explaining I am a bit slow on the uptake sometimes. Seconds after I send it, I find the answer on the Twilio site. So I dropped a note to tech support cancelling the request. This is what I got back…

“Dear techno god,

I am thrilled to hear you were able to setup call forwarding with Twilio. It appears you have already discovered Twimlets, our hosted TwiML service. You can configure a variety of common use cases using Twimlets, and even chain many of them together using the ‘FailUrl’ parameter. You can find a list of available twimlets here:

https://www.twilio.com/labs/twimlets

You might also like our FAQ article with step by step instructions about setting up call forwarding using Twimlets:

http://www.twilio.com/help/faq/voice/how-can-i-set-up-call-forwarding

I appreciate your compliments and want to ensure you’re successful with Twilio. If you have any other questions along the way feel free to ask – we’re here to help.

Sincerely,
Brian
www.twilio.com

PS – I can assure you that by sending your last email you have saved the lives of 1000 kittens.

Do what you want to do but please do anything you can to make bad companies die and good companies thrive.

All of the talks from the 2012 Business of Software Conference are now online. Over the course of the next year we will make the majority of them available as videos and transcripts to everyone via the blog. All attendees to the 2012 conference have been given passwords to access all of the talks now and anyone registering for Business of Software 2013, 28-30th October, will also receive a password.

Access all the videos of Business of Software 2012 talks now AND get a free copy of Dan Pink’s To Sell is Human – $150.

Over the years we have accumulated a great deal of really useful content from BoS conferences: guest blogs as well as talks. But we know a lot of you come here for the presentations, so we have decided to index everything from 2011 and earlier here to make the search easier (of course, all talks are also tagged in the appropriate year category in the blog, so they can be found that way).

Full details on when we are publishing the BoS 2012 talks can be found in this blog post here. If you would like to view all the BoS 2012 videos immediately, with the added bonus of a copy of Dan Pink’s excellent new book, To Sell is Human, they can be purchased as a bundle, by clicking on the link below:

Buy 2012 talks

And a gentle reminder: anyone registering for this year’s event will also receive a code to access the talks prior to their general release.

Talks from 2011

• Professor Clayton Christensen, Professor, Harvard Business School, How to Create New Growth Businesses in a Risk-Minimizing Environment.
• Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman, Ogilvy, Praxeology – Lessons from a lost science.
• Jason Cohen, Founder, Partner, WP Engine, Capital Factory, Naked Business: How I made more money through honesty than through typical business behavior.
• Patrick Mckenzie, CEO, Kalzumeus Software, Engineering your marketing outcomes.
• Tobias Lutke, CEO, Shopify, How to make sure your business is on the right side of history through code & culture.
• Peldi & John Nese, Two Geezers Talking, Balsamiq & One Stop Pop Shop, What matters in business.
• Paul Kenny, Principal, Ocean Learning, The Art of Asking.
• Jeff Lawson, Founder, CEO, Twilio, SaaS & the art of pricing.
• Josh Linkner, Founder, CEO, Partner, ePrize, Detroit Venture Partners, Unleashing Creativity.
• Laura Fitton, VP, HubSpot, Making social media work in business to business.
• Michael McDerment, CEO, President, Freshbooks, A litany of product management mistakes at Freshbooks.
• Alex Osterwalder, Managing Partner, Business Model Generation, Building competitive advantage through business model thinking.
• David Cancel, VP Product, HubSpot, Data driven businesses.
• Dharmesh Shah, Co-founder, CTO , HubSpot, Building Big Ass Software Businesses.
• Alexis Ohanian, Founder, Reddit, Hipmunk, Using software to make the world suck less.

Talks from 2010

• Paul Kenny, Ocean Learning: Hardwiring Sales into your Organisation
• David Russo, Why culture matters and how to manage it
• Seth Godin: Are you afraid to truly make an impact?
• Eric Ries: The science of lean start ups
• Eric Sink: Things I learnt in selling Teamprize to Microsoft
• Jason Cohen: Working out when to break the rules and ignore advice
• Peldi: Do worry, be happy! Keeping sane as a software CEO
• Dan Bricklin: There is always new technology. When should we care?
• Derek Sivers: Values, not term sheets
• Patrick McKenzie: Marketing to Minorities

Talks from 2009

• Geoffrey Moore: When in doubt, look different
• Kathy Sierra: Sustainable business models
• Don Norman
• Paul Kenny: Sales – something for all tech entrepreneurs
• Dharmesh Shah: Ideas for building better software businesses
• Joel Spolsky
• Paul Graham: Trends

Talks from 2008

• Joel Spolsky: Being number 1
• Seth Godin: Why marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department
• Professor Noam Wasserman: Rich or king?
• Jessica Livingstone: Founders at work
• Paul Kenny: How to learn to love your inner sales person
• Eric Sink: Product Management
• Dharmesh Shah: Insights from and around MIT
• Jason Fried: The philosophy of 37Signals
• Alexis Ohanian: Keeping it real: how to start and run a Web 2.0 startup
• Cory Doctorow: Life in the information economy
• Steve Krug: Design and Useability
• Steve Johnson: Why software is not a business

At the end of a packed 2.5 days in October we asked the attendees if they could sum up their BoS experience. Here are their responses – uncensored. Thanks for the feedback: where we can, we will tighten things up. And some of you definitely need more sleep.

• It was an action-packed thrill ride.
• I’m not one to create and execute on specific takeaways as a result of any conference.  But, I’ve come to realize, after several years of attendance, the ideas and skills I’ve learned have somehow seemed to ‘leak’ into my organization anyway.  My organization is better as a result of the ‘tools’ that BOS has provided to me.
• Business of Software gets you out of the trenches and firefighting, and reminds you that there are 20 other dimensions to your business that are fascinating and important and that you have been completely ignoring.
• Badassingly brain busting.
• Overall, the conference is tailored to startups and young companies. We have been around 25 years with an established world wide base. The content was good and the sessions valuable with some good takeaways but we felt we could likely help alot of companies with some of our lessons learned.
• Great speakers and great conversations. An amazing three days, with much learning and inspiration.
• As an early stage founder, Business of Software was a phenomenal opportunity to learn from phenomenal software warriors who’ve been through the paces of a software company. The conference also put things into perspective, allowing me to take a step back from the day to day trenches to see where the business needed to go next.
• Great place for the novice software business person. If you are ready for personal stories and some bonding go, but if you are looking for more thematic learning and ideas of how to evolve you might as well read some good litterature on the topics.
• Learn how to grow your software business.
• TBD.
• It’s like being hit on the head with an anvil forged of startup culture, ideas, and values.  Something that will forever change the way you think about business, software, and organizational architecture.
• A founder-rich environment of entrepreneurial people who want to learn and who are willing to share their experiences and knowledge.
• The Business of Software Conference is a quick way to get up to speed on current thinking in how to build a business that will delight customers.
• I usually come away from the conference with 2 or 3 action items that pay for the conference along with a renewed attitude.
• One of the best places to meet the people who actually make significant revenues in the software industry.
• You are guaranteed to learn something meet someone that makes the trip worth it on their own. As a bonus you get to go to an awesome software conference.
• Imagine a dream world of full employment, meritocracy, innovation and success, abundance, respect, and happiness. It’s real, and it’s going on all the time in the unbridled world of software, and the Business of Software conference is your window into that world.
• As a wannapreneur, it was awesome to be inspired some of my “heroes” speak as well as being pleasantly surprised by the high quality of the talks of those that I didn’t know previously.  And more importantly hope that the connections/relationships that I formed over the past two days continue and spur me to come back next year as an entrepreneur!
• Too much focus on the pure start up.  Many speakers repeated the same theme.  Would benefit from also providing speakers that took a business after start up phase and successfully led through the high growth phase and created a business with lasting value.    Also, no discussions on practical operational challenges of running a software business.  For example, a real discussion on remote versus central development teams, etc.
• Attending BoS is an absolute necessity for anyone involved in software start-ups and provides invaluable information for those in established software companies.
• Expensive – lost some of the “feel” from 2011 being much larger and also the expense made me much more aware of going.
• A great conference for great entrepreneurs to exchange great information about building great business focused on making users great.
• An opportunity to take a step back from the business and get inspired and re-energized, so I can dive back into the business with new ideas, hopes, and wisdom.
• Each year you somehow present the best speakers perfectly relevant to our current/latest dilemma.  Are you eavesdropping on our management calls.
• Defies summing up.  Brilliance, compassion, excellence and support all around — who else would you want to hang out, learn, and explore with?
• same as #14: It’s rare that I can have an interesting business conversation with any random person next to me – this is one of the few venues where I can pick a person out of the crowd and have a deep meaningful conversation, help them, or learn from them.
• Being a software company already grown out of the startup phase and well into maturity, it’s still amazing how much I learn from this conference, which is seemingly the “how to” for start up enterpeneaurs.
• Unless you’re buried under a pile of money you pretty much don’t have any excuse for not being at the Business of Software conference.
• Amazingly well done conference. The talks are outstanding and the people you’ll meet are even better.
• BoS is alike to taking a deep breath of fresh air while jogging through the park .. just that it is intellectually doing so with fresh thinking, knowledge and experiences of speakers already blazing the path being unraveled..
• A skinny dip into a pool of software passion.     A high entropy solar wind of actionable information to turn you into a badass s/w entrepreneur.
• Best conference I have ever attended!
• This conference reminded me of being in the classroom with favorite professors.  Clarity, delivery, substance–it was all there!–were the marks of every speaker.  Their collective honesty and vulnerabilty, frankly, made for a rich and open environment where learning can fluorish, far beyond the confines of business or technology.
• It’s good to realize you’re not alone; there are many entrepreneurs facing the very same problems, and they’re just as confused as you are.
• Engaging and enlightening conference that allows you to learn more about the software industry and connect with others.
• Go for the content, re-go for the audience
• It’s like a spa weekend for software entrepreneur geeks – you leave feeling recharged, focused and cetered but also a little bit sore.
• The conference every software entrepreneur must attend.
• Great place to meet, interact with, listen to, and exchange ideas with like-minded and passionate individuals.
• There is nothing like the Business of Software conference anywhere in the world.  It’s a place where passionate practitioners in the software industry convene to learn and share.  My favorite event of the year.
• Every time I come to BOS I feel like I’ve found my “tribe.”  Fellow techie entrepreneurs who are dying to roll up there sleeves to get a business going.
• BoS is a great venue to meet people, share experiences and learn about how to grow in the (fascinating) business of software. In my opinion, BoS is the best conference for those who are focused in getting their startups on a path to growth through knowledge and shared experiences.
• I got enough inspiration and knowledge in three days to keep our company busy until BoS 2013. It was an experience that no other conference can offer.
• The most inspirational three days of our year. We went home with more homework on how to improve our company and our product than we’ve ever had from a different conference.
• Simply the best conference to attend if you’re serious about running a successful software company.
• Software is only as good as the problems it solves for its users.
• An intent 2 1/2 day event that condensed the best knowledge, wisdom, and experience from the world of starting, growing, and running a software company into one delicious package.
• Nice to get out of the office and have time to think about big business issues rather than the details of the day-to-day
• an awesome collage of people, ideas and information that will help bootstrap your software product company into a BADASS software business with wildly ecstatic customers.
• A bunch of ambitious, smart, hardworking geeks leveraging each other’s knowledge to create their own rules and figure out how to build profitable, sustainable businesses and lifestyles.    I also left wondering; “What is the Business of Software?”.  When is your business about software vs. services? Is GroupOn in the business of software? Is AppSumo (a GroupOn for apps/online services) in the business of software? How about Facebook are they in the business of software? Is the orientation here that the business of software is about delivering business to business products and services versus business to consumer? The line is very blurry, but the audience and content seemed much more focused on business to business solutions.
• I’m very, very tired
• Stay away if your personal finances aren’t in order, because you might just quit your day job and start a company after this meeting. (please don’t use my last name or last initial if you use this in a testimonial)
• Business of Software is a place to meet and talk with people going through the same challenges as you, then learn actionable information on how you can improve your business.
• the best mastermind group in the world for startups. most of your tech smb rockstars in one room.
• Mind stretching brain food
• The most interesting and highest-quality software conference by far. Attendees aren’t too shoddy either.
• A friendly and informal conference with inspiring speakers and attendees. An evangelical church for software entrepreneurs with charismatic ministers and testimonials from members of the congregation.
• Invaluable advice for software companies
• I found that (a) it replenished my sense of excitement and confidence in my startup, (b) drove home the point that I am not the first person to wrestle the sort of difficult questions I’m wrestling with, and (c) provided me with a LOT of ideas and perspectives to mull over going forward.
• Come and be amazed and engaged by leaders and inspirational speakers from the business of software.
• Meeting awesome people, the doers, the FOUNDERS.
• Stimulating, thought provoking, fun, thoroughly worthwhile and good value for money.
• Perect opportunity to swap war stories and elevate everyone’s game!
• Expose yourself without the constraints of the title on your business card to change the way you approach the software business.
• Jet fuel of inspiration and problem solving tools and approaches for entrepreneurs and wannabe entrepreneurs
• The only conference I know of where you leave more mentally awake and refreshed than coming in. To anyone considering coming, DO IT.
• A college semester’s worth of training in entrepreneurship and working in the software industry, packed into three days with a room full of people who are all smarter than you.
• I was honored to be part of an incredible network of talent actively discussing how best to apply their passions and address software business challenges.
• Independence of agenda is imperative to creating an interactive and informative events for the ISV community.
• You dont know what you dont know until you know what others know.
• this wasn’t the theme of all talks, but I liked this aspect: startup wisdom for companies of all sizes and stages.
• Some hundred software biz nerds from around the world sharing their learnings.
• This was the best BoS yet. The only drawback was that there was TOO much good stuff to think about! My next six months are already overbooked!
• BoS is the only place where I feel – professionally – amongst my peers. We’re all working to use technology to build successful and sustainable businesses. I always walk away thinking bigger, thinking clearer, and looking forward to the next time I can be here again.
• As a first timer to BoS, it’s great to meet with like minded people building real business in the areas we are passionate about. That together with the high quality presenters makes this a must see conference. I will defintely be back next year.
• Great for anyone looking to start a company.
• It’s a conference about software but not about code, and one where the presentations are just one-fifth of the real show. And it picked up right where last year left off.
• Inspirational
• The BoS experience is the truest and best representative set of what is now and what is next in software from a business perspective.  Nowhere else can you have access to the people actually DOing the innovation in tech, and they are just as passionate as you are about the craft which remains so essential to success in the software business.
• If you’re serious about your software company there’s no better place to spend your money than going to this conference.
• The only place where I can meet so many similar founders and get real answers to my specific business problems.
• Amazing crowd and good content. Down to earth conversations, a good place to come back to
• Good opportunity to stay out of the day-to-day business for 3 days and reflect on some ideas/what other people are doing (and some academic research).
• BoS equips you to understand what success is to you and also how to reach it.
• That line that “the people make the conference?” It’s never more true than at BoS. So many great conversations with great people, all looking to learn from each other.
• Well worth the investment.
• Fourth year here, and the caliber of participants is better than ever.
• Inspiring
• Hear inspiring content, have amazing conversations, and make fantastic connections!
• nope 🙂
• A gathering of real entrepreneurs who help each other and build a community
• Everything about the business of software, except technology.
• BoS is a software, technology, and business focused TED. And, because of that, for me, it might be better than TED.
• Smart people. Epic learning.
• A boostrapper’s MBA in 3 days. An opportunity to learn from software thought leaders offering actionable and seasoned advice.
• BoS is a great community of startup entrepreneurs.

Index to the summaries of the Business of Software 2012 presentations.

Kathy Sierra – Building the Minimum Badass User

Jason Cohen – How data, statistics and numbers will make you do the wrong thing

Joel Spolsky – The Cultural Anthropology of Stack Exchange

Dharmesh Shah – Valuation, Competition, Porter’s Five Forces and Culture

Peter Bauer – Founding Principles vs. Scaling Principles

Noah Kagan – Lovegasms

Peldi Guilizzoni – Coding is the Easy Part

Michael Trafton – How to build company culture in three easy steps

Adii Pienaar – A message of Hope

Dan Lyons – The “Post-PC” Era

Gail Goodman – The Long, Slow SaaS Ramp of Death

Paul Kenny – Resistance is Futile

Noam Wasserman – Understanding Founder’s Dilemmas

Bob Dorf – How Silicon Valley Innovates

Dan Pink – The Surprising Truth About Moving Others

Noah gives a talk on rogue marketing strategies and the six steps to the Lovegasm.

Video & Summary below

This is a summary of Peter Bauer’s Business of Software 2012 presentation.

Founding and scaling principles

According to Peter, the four principles to a successful company are:

1. Build something with friends
2. Deal constructively with fears about success
3. Never allow an investor to change the chemistry or assert their agenda above that of the company
4. Clear intent and logistics

Build something with friends

Mimecast started in 2003 before cloud computing was cloud computing. It’s been almost 10 years. Mimecast started over a bottle of Absinth, as a group of friends drinking together said they should start a company and work with each other.

It was not a picnic, however. They were deadly serious about success and about each other. They were fully engaged in building together, and it was obvious who the contributors were.

Working with friends is one of the key reasons Mimecast was created. When hiring they ask, “Can this person act and work with us like a friend?” But this extends beyond the company to customers, suppliers, etc.

Favor endurance over brilliance.

Deal constructively with fears about success

One of the biggest challenges of an entrepreneur is the guilt of prioritizing work and the fear of missing out on your family. An entrepreneur is compelled to choose between family failure or business failure. You start to think great success isn’t the thing for you and you start buckling. Peter would think “Do I want to go up there?”, when thinking about success. However, his co-founder would say success brings many options.

The first five years of a startup are risky from a business perspective. Because they were backed into a corner they found more efficient ways of being successful. The early stage is not the time of sustainable effort, it’s the time of gravity defying heroics. A real CEO thinks, “The harder you make it sound, the more I want to do it.”

A strong sentiment after the dotcom bust was that founders could not scale, and VCs kept thinking they needed to pick the management team.

Don’t let the team expire.

Never allow an investor that would change the chemistry

Writing that check doesn’t make you right.

Angels provided a better way for Mimecast. Then by the time they brought in VCs, they had proven themselves and could assert the company’s interest over the investors’ interest.

Clear intent and logistics

When considering intent on scoring think about boys playing soccer.  The young kids have no intent – they run around because it’s fun. The older kids, on the other hand, are intent on scoring. Just participating is not intent.

You should be far more frightened by the guy that has intent…intent on taking you out. Intent creates a power multiplier. A lot of startups are bumbling along, waiting to be taken out by someone with intent.

Targets help define and declare intent. Mimecast’s sales department had a focus on intent, and the whole business followed sales. The non-revenue generating departments would apologize to the sales department for anything they did that took away from the sales resources. This started to impede Mimecast’s growth, so they began putting product marketing and system goals as a priority. Then they had to ensure those projects had intent of their own, so they forced the non-numeric intent departments to write down their goals.

The AIM (Actionable Intent Matrix) factors determine the supply chain of success.

[Justin Goeres has a more detailed summary of Peter’s presentation on his blog.]

This is a summary of Jason Cohen‘s Business of Software 2012 presentation.

Metrics – You’re Doing it Wrong

The way you’re approaching metrics in your business is wrong. How you’re using data is wrong, because the tools you’re using are wrong.

When asked to guess how many jelly beans are in a jar, individual answers are off by 67%. However, if you average all the answers together, the average is only off by 3%. People suck at guessing, but averaging guesses across people is a nearly perfect predictor of truth…sometimes.

The wisdom of the crowd only works for certain things. When asked to vote for the funniest joke, the wisdom of the crowd didn’t produce it. Crowds are wise when there’s a correct answer. Crowds are useful in objectivity, and destructive in creativity. Yes, crowds are not just neutral in creativity, in fact they are actually worse (i.e. destructive).

Take A/B tests as an example. A/B tests are usually not done right. Picking B over A because it is beating A by a little bit can be very destructive. Sparefoot, an Austin startup, ran an A/A test using Google Website Optimizer, and found that Google Website Optimizer had one A beating itself!

When what you are testing for is rare, the results are overwhelmingly wrong.

Jason has a great (and super cute!) article on his blog on easy significance testing (and hamsters).

The way you determine whether an A/B test shows a statistically significant difference is:

1. Define N as “the number of trials.” N = A + B = total number of conversions
2. Define D as “half the difference between the ‘winner’ and the ‘loser’.” D = (A – B) / 2
3. The test result is statistically significant if D^2 is bigger than N.

Data Points

Seek large outcomes from more traffic (as in 100,000’s of data points, not 10,000’s), especially if you are a small company. Go for the big stuff and shy away from the small stuff. A great example of this is Google’s famous 41 shades of blue test. Google ran this experiment to determine which shade of blue received the most clicks. Running this test with 2 shades of blue, and picking one winner with a 95% confidence level, leads to a 5% chance of a false-positive. Running this test with 41 shades of blue, leads to an 88% chance of a false-positive.

Test theories, not headlines. Don’t spitball headlines. First form a theory about why a change would be better, then test it. If the theory turns out to be invalid, think about what other assumptions could be wrong. Invalidating a theory gives you an opportunity to think deeper, and come up with another theory. Examples of theories:

• People from the UK like to see a lot of vowels in the word color.
• On this page people are ready to buy.
• At this point, the user is ready to talk to customer service.
• People that land on this page by searching Google with the keyword “security” would like to see a testimonial about security.

Which metrics matter?

Which metrics actually matter?

• Growth rate?
• Cancellation rate?
• Conversion rate?
• Total revenue?
• Support costs?

Which variables should I care about? The ones that have the biggest impact on growth, revenue and cash.

Let’s take a hypothetical affiliate program for a SaaS product as an example, and figure out what’s important. Affiliate program parameters:

• 20 sales/month
• $100 average affiliate on time payout
• $20/month average new monthly recurring revenue (MRR)

Using a simple model in a spreadsheet, it looks like we will break even in about four to five months. Now let’s add a 15%/month growth. That 15% growth causes 50% more costs. But that doesn’t count cancellation rates, or affiliate customers being lower quality (i.e. cancel more). The end result: your dead (with a 10%/month cancellation rate). If we then increase the price by $10/month (50% more MRR), we’re back to breaking even at 4 – 5 months.

Affiliate program optimization priorities:

1. Increase MRR.
2. Start with small payouts (threshold). Don’t try to optimize the hell out of it, just make sure to stay within the box.
3. Prevent cancellations by affiliates.
4. Growth is bad until 1 – 3 are solid.

Conclusion

Strategy:

• Pick 1 – 2 key metrics to optimize.
• Pick a few thresholds to watch via simple sensitivity analysis.
• Fold real data back into the model.

Tactics:

• The wrong process is worse than nothing.
• Test theories, not “see what sticks.”
• Use real significance tests (hamster test), and seek large effects.

[I’d like to thank Bill Horvath, founder of DoX Systems, for sharing his notes with me.]