Rita McGrath, Professor at Columbia Business School and Scott Farquhar, CEO and co-Founder of Atlassian, will be talking at this year’s Business of Software Conference.

This is what they want to share with you…

Professor Rita McGrath will be explaining why the concept of sustainable competitive advantage, long touted as a key principle of corporate strategy the world over no longer applies in today’s fast-moving and rapidly evolving world. She will share the concept of temporary advantage and what that means for you. One thing it does mean is that you have to be brave and be prepared to exit from business activities that won’t be sustainable in the long term – how can you do that elegantly?

Scott Farquhar will talk of a few non-public incidents that almost broke the company and how Atlassian’s management team came through them as well as the challenges and benefits of Atlassian’s fabled, ‘No salespeople’ approach to sales. What were the most important things that Scott learned as a founder entrepreneur in taking a startup to the point that it is one of the most credible technology IPO candidates in the software business?

Scott is also keen to make the talk as relevant as possible for the Business of Software Conference audience so drop us a line with your question about growing a software business and Scott will try to answer some of them in his talk.

We will announce some exciting new speakers next week as well as some details about additional workshops we have organised to run for the whole afternoon on the last day of the conference – the conference closes at lunchtime on Wednesday but we will have a small number of workshops around product management, customer care, strategy for software entrepreneurs. These will be more structured than the informal gatherings we’ve had in past years and will involve an additional nominal charge – though considerably less than the price you would pay to attend workshops in the open market. Intrigued? You should be. 🙂

June 11^th 2043

“We need more white men in technology and have to make more efforts to make sure that London and the South East are supported more. It is simply not fair that the technology industry is so dominated by women and the Wick technology cluster is still sucking talent from across the United Kingdom.” said a 73 year old Mark Littlewood.

“As a young man, I never thought about what was then an almost entirely male dominated industry, why should I? Everything was easy for us and it didn’t seem that strange to me at the time that so many industry events were filled with rather boring people wearing rather boring dark suits, white/blue shirts and the only possible way of being able to know where in the pecking order people were was to ask them what kind of company car they drove. Sure it was very boring but there were good times too. We used to get drunk and celebrate hitting our quarterly sales target for selling the latest piece of useless enterprise software. Unless we missed them. Unless we missed them. Then we were fired but we all knew we could walk into another sales job with another big software company because they only hired those white men with proven enterprise sales experience so it was a bit of a closed shop.

“I rebelled against the status quo, by wearing shirts that weren’t white and often went without a tie. (Remember, it wasn’t until 2019 that scientists in California were able to prove that wearing ties restricted blood flow to the brain and made men make bad decisions). Later, particularly after the birth of my daughter, I started to feel very uneasy about the whole assumption that it was only men that could write code and run technology companies. She was a super smart kid who was really into technology but didn’t understand why so many technology companies and events only had men at them. I tried to help but it was hard work.

“Today, the pendulum has swung the other way. White men are a minority, albeit not a persecuted minority as the industry seems much more accepting of anyone, regardless of background but it does worry me that the traditional doers in the technology industry are so badly represented. We need to do something.

“Looking back, the tipping point for me was an event I went to in 2013. It was held in South Cambridge, (known by many at the time as ‘TechCity’), and I went to an old car park, or church, I can’t remember exactly. There were a bunch of school kids there who were going to, ‘pitch their apps’ (remember apps!?). People I trust said they would be good but I knew they were only kids so I reminded myself they were children, not grown-ups with proper ideas and I shouldn’t be too mean to them when they rambled on about their ‘entrepreneurial journey’ and described their useless ideas about how to trick people into clicking on adverts for stupid products that no one would want. (This was a very popular idea at the time – remember, it was 30 year ago!).

“I walked into the room it was buzzing. I hadn’t even had a chance to open the event programme before I was approached by a girl offering me fashion advice. (That wasn’t unusual for me in those days, still isn’t actually though most people I know in real life gave up a long time ago). She and a bunch of her best friends had come up with an idea for an app with some great ideas for helping girls choose outfits. Charming, enthusiastic, articulate, intelligent, open, the team Dynamic App Company from Hillcrest School made a huge impression on me with their friendliness and offer of helping me to style my wardrobe. they were a bit like an intelligent, functioning, version of the Spice Girls who were doing something useful with their lives.

“Then it struck me. Women were not represented in the tech industry in any meaningful way at the time – less than 5% of VC backed companies had a female CEO for example at the time and a lot of VCs would pat themselves heartily on the back for ‘beating the average’ if they had one investment in ten with a female founder in those days. This was a room full of more girls than boys. And the girls were good. Very good. Brilliant in fact. The girls were leading the teams.”

“Normally, the protocol at that sort of event in those days is you turn up, grab a drink then hang out with a couple of other men you knew to talk about ‘deals’, the latest venture capital fund raise, your new car that sort of stuff but this was different. I don’t think I spent more than a minute speaking to anyone I already knew, I was sucked into an endless whirl of meeting amazing people who had brilliant ideas and had sat down, come up with a problem they wanted to solve and worked out how they would solve it. This was weird (the culture at the time often measured the success of an idea by how much money it made the venture capitalist that had funded it). These people were really young kids with problems. Not the sort of problems that couldn’t be solved, the sort of problems that they just matter-of-factly knew were there, worked out a way of tackling the problem and got on with it.

“It was stunning. Try as I might, I simply couldn’t talk to all of the teams. There was a queue of people who wanted to talk to them all and I missed some out. Every team I talked to left me feeling excited, happy and enthusiastic. Hopeful that some of these ideas – almost all of the ideas – would actually make the world a better place for someone.

“Did you know that some dyslexics find reading words easier if the words are in a particular colour? Neither did I till some 13 year old kids from Stratford Upon Avon explained one of the ideas behind Xcite – an app they had come up with as one of their team was dyslexic. Another team from the same school had an ace instrument tuning app. A team from Bentley Wood High School had a brilliant idea for an app that helped young carers. Nelson Thomlinson School had great ideas to help people with learning disabilities. The enthusiasm of the Westfield Junior School team who wanted to bring Manga to Britain was breathtaking.

“I remember wishing there were a couple more hours so I could talk to all the teams. Then we had to sit down and listen to the talks from the organisers, the sponsors and hear ‘pitches’ from all of the teams. They had one minute each. In the days before teleportation, this was called an elevator pitch. Lord knows I have sat through a bunch of those in my time. They are tough things to do and usually people get them totally wrong and leave you with no idea about what the ideas is. Trust me. I worked out I had seen over 5,000 pitches from companies in the previous 10 years and 90% of them left me none the wiser about what the ideas was or why it mattered. They were usually designed to be boring.

“I can honestly say that I left that evening thinking that they had given the best set of ideas presentations I had ever heard. (Not in a patronising, give them a break they are kids kind of way. In a, these guys have some serious Silicon Valley (remember that!?) hustle but are actually trying to solve problems tha people care about kind of way. Most importantly, every company described the problem they were trying to solve and the job that they wanted their app to do.

“And then there were the kids from Wick. Four teams competing across 6 categories of app. Two of their teams won their categories – it could have been more if they weren’t competing against another team from, err, Wick.

“It was only a matter of time before the industry changed. After all, even Larry Ellison, one of many technology sexists of the time with all his billions couldn’t pay to keep all those kids, (and therefore out of the technology industry Man Club), at school forever.

“I loved the idea of getting more women, more diversity into the technology industry but now things have swung too far the other way. Granted, the industry is more open, more innovative, more thoughtful, more useful to humanity but those investment obsessed white men of the 80s, 90s, and early decades of the 21^st century have a place in it too. It was inevitable that the new wave of innovators and game changers would not be white men when everyone had a chance to shine. We should support their reintegration into the technology ecosystem. They weren’t all bad.”

When I asked Iris Lapinski, The CEO of Apps for Good, to speak at the Business of Software Conference in January I was delighted that she accepted. A brilliant communicator who has done something amazing in very short order to address the huge challenges facing us as an industry around, not only lack of diversity but the worrying lack of people who are choosing computer science at school. What I saw last night was orders of magnitude more impressive than I had expected. Collectively, those kids talked about their ideas, the problems they want to solve and the jobs their apps were going to do in a way that I don’t often see when talking to ‘grown up’ entrepreneurs. You will not want to miss this.

Some pictures from the Apps For Good Award presentation evening.

I wish I had a picture of everyone there as some of those people are stepping out to make the world a seriously better place. An inspiring and humbling evening for me and for many others. A night that would change the world of technology for good. Forever.

The Apps for Good Awards, June 2013.

Came to BoS 2012? Can’t remember the name of that great speaker just after coffee on the second day? Would like to know the title of Bob Dorf’s presentation? We have saved the schedule from 2012 here to help you out.

Business of Software 2012 Schedule

We were very sad to hear about the terrible news yesterday of the attack on the Boston Marathon.

A horrible day for Boston but we will still be back for the Business of Software Conference, (in response to the email we had asking if the conference will still be going ahead, err, yes). Like millions of other people, we will continue to come to Boston, one of the world’s great cities.

To all those affected, you are very much in our thoughts. Boston, while in understandable shock, is already bouncing back.

People in Boston are running again in defiance of the attack. Stories of normal people who became heroes are emerging. The great thing about humans is that they can overcome almost anything together in extraordinarily difficult times and it is testament to the power of the human spirit that the most common reaction from the crowds gathered at the finish line when the bombs went off was not to run away to safety, but to run to the point where they felt they could offer the most help.

Almost 30 years ago, terrorists tried to assassinate the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher and her entire Cabinet at the Conservative Party Conference by exploding a bomb in the early morning at the hotel in which the government were staying.

The conference was scheduled to start at 9.00 am the next morning and the immediate reaction from many was to cancel the conference. It started, at 9.30 and this is what Margaret Thatcher had to say.

The old Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, said this after the 7 July 2005 bombings…

“In the days that follow look at our airports, look at our sea ports and look at our railway stations and, even after your cowardly attack, you will see that people from the rest of Britain, people from around the world will arrive in London to become Londoners and to fulfil their dreams and achieve their potential. They choose to come to London, as so many have come before because they come to be free, they come to live the life they choose, they come to be able to be themselves… …nothing you do, however many of us you kill, will stop that flight to our city where freedom is strong and where people can live in harmony with one another. Whatever you do, however many you kill, you will fail.”

Swap ‘London’ for ‘Boston’ and the same words apply.

Whatever your political views and outlook, whatever your definition of what constitutes a, ‘terrorist act’, they are words to live by.

Read this – The Boston Marathon Bombing: Keep Calm and Carry On.

I know we are all sending you good thoughts and we can’t wait to come back and visit your amazing city and spend time with the awesome people that live there.

Instead of doing that really important thing that you should be doing, have a look at this instead. It gives you some great ideas for making yourself more productive, less stressed and probably, less of an a**hole about work. In a world where many talk about the insane hours they have to work in order to ‘kill it’ (or substitute the latest Silicon Valley phrase of the day), it is worth remembering that your output is measured by results, not hours spent at your desk.

This is a brilliant list of ideas to save time and make your life (not just work life), more effective.

I don’t think so but I am interested in other views…

There has been a lot written and tweeted in the past week or so about the fallout from PyCon which has spiraled out of control. Terribly. It led to PyCon revising its code of conduct for participants and subsequently, a number of people have contacted us to suggest that we have a code of conduct too. I feel for all of the individuals who have been caught up in the mess.

It matters to me that people can feel they can come to our conference and feel comfortable participating. A lot. Here’s why.

Last year at Business of Software, some people took offense at some of the remarks that one of the speakers made (I believe the details are unimportant for the purposes of this post). What is important is that some people were made to feel uncomfortable. As a conference and event organiser this is a failure on my part. Watch the video if you want to know why this is so important to me personally – but short cut – I want my children to feel comfortable going into the software industry if that is what they choose to do. I believe we all do.

It was interesting that one person who had been the most enthusiastic supporters of the speaker in question on the day, decided to change their attitude when they smelt a possible fight in the offing. One in particular deleted their enthusiastic tweets from the day before and tried to start a campaign of some sort against the speaker, the conference, the attendees, I’m not even sure quite what. I don’t believe this represented the views of almost anyone else involved. It was extraordinary to me to see how quickly negative sentiment would travel via Twitter and what an extraordinarily bad medium twitter was for nuanced conversations.

It matters to me that we are a welcoming and inclusive community because Business of Software is a special group of people that care. We don’t run the event to maximise the profit we make, we run it to make money but more importantly, to make a difference to the community we serve. This year in fact, despite selling out last year, we are making the event smaller to maintain the intimate feel that we have built so carefully over the years. The Business of Software Conference is my home for the few days it is on and our delegates are paying guests in that home. I think people instinctively know how to behave in someone’s home and I trust people to understand that and behave accordingly.

I don’t ask people to agree to a code of conduct when they come to my house for dinner. If someone offends someone else at a dinner party I am holding, I would have a quiet word with that person. They would probably be mortified to know what they had said or done had caused offense and they are likely to modify their behaviour in the future.

The Business of Software Conference is a small event for people who care about building long term, sustainable software businesses. The people who attend are overwhelmingly lovely, thoughtful people. I have made many wonderful friends through putting it on. The content and discussions at the conference mean that the people who come have generally self-selected to be of a certain type. It is one reason we want to keep the event small. It is also the reason that I don’t think we need a code of conduct. I genuinely believe that people are good and don;t need to be told how to behave.

What do you think?

P.S. I would also welcome thoughts, in the comments or via email, if you have any ideas that can help us make the programme more welcoming to anyone if they care about our core philosophy of wanting to help people grow long term, sustainable software businesses.

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.