Cheers John Knox, Founder of Moving Average, long time attendee at Business of Software and a guy that cares a lot about helping people, especially engineers, to have great careers in great software businesses – he even wrote a book about it.

John has offered to fund Business of Software Scholarships for a couple of students/recent graduates who would not otherwise be able to attend the Business of Software Conference in October so they can meet great people and be encouraged to spend a career building great software businesses. John is particularly keen to hear from people who would not be able to attend in any other circumstances.

Thank you John!

John Knox at Business of Software by the lovely Betsy Weber.

Here’s how to apply.

Register your contact details and tell us why you would like to attend and what you would bring to the conversation by August 31st 2012. John will pick two scholars and the chosen ones will get to go as his guest. Not only is he an extraordinarily generous, thoughtful, guy, he knows just about everyone there so this is like getting a VIP pass.

If anyone wants to support the growth of the software industry by offering a helping hand to others, we’re always happy to hear from you.

APPLY FOR STUDENT SCHOLARSHIP HERE, APPLY NOW. Closes August 31st 2012.

Guest post by Jeff Gibson, Intercept Solutions.

My history with the Business of Software conference goes back to 2009, when it was held out in San Francisco. I’ve been coming ever since. The first two years were relatively quiet. I got to meet some great people. Got to hear some amazing speakers and learn a lot of new information on the best way to start software companies.

As I was getting ready to register for the conference last year, I caught a tweet mentioning that Mark wanted to put a band together to play at the conference. Now mind you, not only have I been developing software for 30 years, but I’ve also been a musician since I was in elementary school. So seeing this tweet definitely got my interest up.

I sent an email to Mark telling him that I was a musician and would love be a part of it. In our conversation I brought up the fact that the band I was in had just played a week at Epcot Center in Orlando Florida. Little did I know that by bringing that up, I was about to be the go to guy for the band he wanted to put together. The next thing I knew, I was staring at 14 email addresses belonging to musicians from all around the globe that wanted to participate in the band. I knew things were about to get VERY interesting!

Honestly, the whole thing confirmed my assumption that technology individuals make up some of the best musicians out there!

Needless to say, Mark is on a mission from God, and wants to put the band back together for BOS2012!!

Business of Software 2011 Band – Whiskey Priest, Boston, MA

So the “Call for Musicians” is out. If you’re coming to the Business of Software Conference 2012 and you play an instrument, sing (or both). Send me an email with your contact info to jgibson@interceptsolutions.com. I would love to talk with you about what we’re doing.

[Mark says: JFDI! Please let Jeff know as soon as possible if you want to take part. The band was brilliant last year though not everyone can make it back. The venue we have selected for the party on Monday night is probably even better suited to an evening of singalong AND quiet networking. There are two distinct and separate spaces so if you want to come and talk quietly with your fellow attendees, you can do so happily even as upstairs in a separate area some of us will be tapping our feet and singing along to some wicked tunes.]

A follow up on our Startup two for one offer at Business of Software. We did say we would try to match founders who wanted to take advantage but here is an easier way. Here’s the deal for single startup founders – save 50%.

If you’re a single founder and want to grow a great software business, we would love you to come to:

“The best conference of the year”, (Tobi Lutke, CEO, Shopify)

Don’t take our (Or Tobi’s) word for it though… Jason Cohen, (Smart Bear Software and WP Engine) says:

“If you’re a serious software entrepreneur in any stage, it will change your life to attend Business of Software: businessofsoftware.org“

Dharmesh Shah, CTO & Founder, Hubspot calls it,

“My favorite Conference”

Joel Spolsky, CEO, Fog Creek & Stack Exchange

“Every speaker is a keynote quality speaker… What you are learning is how to make a product that is useful in the world.”

And here is ALL the feedback from last year… And who’s coming to Business of Software this year?.

So, if you want to come, and can’t take advantage of the Business of Software Startup BOGOF – either because you are a single founder or you you don’t think you can afford to send two founders out of the office/bedroom/Starbucks/incubator/AOL (we love that story), the price just, ‘feels too much right now’ and you don’t know if it will be ‘value right now’, or whatever…

If you are a startup founder, you can attend Business of Software at a 50% discount to the current price – prices rise as we get closer to the event.

We have 20 places available.

You qualify if you:

• Are attending Business of Software for the first time.
• Have been incorporated since October 1st 2011.
• Really want to join our amazing community of software people.
• Are FULLY committed to the startup – it must be your primary job – not a side project, a full-on, full-time gig.

Click straight to the DISCOUNT Price – or use the CODE: Startup50 when you register.

If you have any doubt about whether you meet the criteria to qualify, please contact us directly to check.

Thank you for a record number of Lightning Talk Submissions. Over 40 in total with videos so we have some work to do to go through them all and work out how they fit into the overall programme. Thank you!

While we enjoy those, enjoy the Winning Lightning Talk from Business of Software 2011. Justin Goere’s, ‘Getting to Nowhere’.

We will try to notify everyone that submitted a talk by the end of this week and at that point publish the schedule for the conference.

I stumbled across an old hard drive the other day, and rewatched Jennifer Aaker‘s talk from Business of Software 2009. Jennifer is a professor at Stanford GSB, and co-author of the excellent Dragonfly Effect book (if you care about how you can use social media to propel social change, you should buy a copy from Amazon – it’s excellent).

It was a fascinating talk in which Jennifer talked about her work mining data and using statistical methods to reach conclusions about what makes people happy. Jennifer has kindly agreed that I can post a handful of excerpts here.

In this first clip, Jennifer talks about building strong brands inside out: how really strong brands understand what they mean to themselves and how this is reflected outwards.

http://blip.tv/play/hatwgv77YQA

In this second clip, Jennifer talks about the importance of volunteering.

http://blip.tv/play/hatwgv77XQA

In this final clip , Jennifer talks about what small steps you can take, tomorrow, to increase your effectiveness and meaningfulness in your work and life.

http://blip.tv/play/hatwgv77XwA

You can find out more about Jennifer on her web site, or follow her on twitter.

Enjoyed this post? Follow me on twitter

We watched the Opening Ceremony for the Olympic Games instead of answering registration questions yesterday. We thought it was a rather wonderful reflection of Britain as a nation that is quirky and always ready to laugh at itself. Even Mr Bean managed to be funny.

What did the rest of the world think?

Sorry if you didn’t get an answer to your question if you had one. You should have by now. We have extended the Early Bird Registration Deadline to midnight PST on Sunday to give you time to register or submit your Lightning Talk idea.

Great news! Wonderful Kathy Sierra is speaking at Business of Software this year. That’s good enough to let you know by itself but there’s lots of other things going on that we wanted to remind you about too – the startup ‘Two for One’ offer, new videos, guest blogs and of course, for the brave, the Lightning Talk submission deadline 29th July.‘

Kathy’s Talk: Building the Minimum Badass User‘.

“The Lean Start-up movement gave us powerful, useful tools to discover what users want and how they want it, including the MVP or “Minimum Viable Product.” But the key attributes of a deeply desirable, sustainably successful product don’t live in the product. They live in the users. While pretty much anyone today can build an MVP in, oh, 45 minutes (assuming you’re not too picky about the “V”), building an MBU can be the most viable competitive advantage. We’ll look at exactly what and how to do it for both new and existing apps and services.”

If you want to see why Kathy has got people so excited, look at this talk she did in 2009. As Neil said when he posted that video, “Skewering social media is just one of many things Kathy Sierra does in this brilliant talk from last year’s Business of Software conference. If you do one thing today, watch this video. Cancel lunch, shut down twitter, don’t go to that meeting. Whatever you do, watch this.” As relevant now as then.

Welcome back Kathy. She’ll be talking at Business of Software along with Joel Spolsky, Adii Rockstar, Noah Kagan, Dan Lyons, Noam Wasserman, Paul Kenny, Jason Cohen, Bob Dorf, Gail Goodman, Peldi, Dan Pink, Mikey Trafton and Dharmesh Shah.

Lightning Talks If want to do a Lightning Talk this year, please submit your proposal, ideally via video so we can get a sense of the presentation style, by 29th July. Lightning Talk speakers get a free pass to the conference. More information about Lightning Talks here. Here’s previous Lightning Talk speaker Joe Corkery on why you should do a Lightning Talk.

Some of the things you might have missed if you don’t check the blog regularly (Subscribe to the RSS here):

• Want to know who is coming? (We have over 300 registered now) Here is the breakdown of current attendees by company size, job and what people want to talk about. Who is coming to BoS 2012 so far?.
• Nice ideas about non-obvious ways of recruiting technical talent from Ricardo Sanchez. In search of talent.
• NEW VIDEO Honesty in Business. One of our favorite ‘naked businessman’, Jason Cohen, explains why honesty makes him more money than the alternative in this talk from last year’s Business of Software. Video (with transcript) Creating Naked Businesses.
• A short follow up post by Joca Torres, on building an MVP in 10 days. Building an MVP in 10 days. I wonder what Kathy Sierra will say?
• NEW VIDEO SaaS and the Art of Software Pricing. Everything you need to know about pricing your SaaS from Jeff Lawson, founder and CEO of Twilio. He also shares current industry best practice for owl drawing. (Warning, contains strong language).

All the talks from last year can be accessed from here with a pass code. You also receive a pass code when you register for BoS2012.

• #BoS2012 takes place 1st-3rd October, 2012 (finishing at 13.00), at the InterContinental Hotel, Boston.
• Don’t forget, you can save $650 on the full price of conference attendance if you register by 27th July.
• As a little extra bonus, we still have about 15 copies of Dan Pink’s excellent book, Drive, to give to the next people to register.

Please get in touch if you have any questions. Please note that we have had some issues receiving email on the info@businessofsoftware.org address which have now been resolved. If you haven’t had a response from us about a question you may have (and are not a speaker agency asking when the speaking deadline passed, an AV company offering us AV services etc), please resend, either to the info@ address or direct to me.

It’s payback time.

In our first ever BoS caption contest we highlighted a photo of Paul Kenny from Business of Software 2011. We received a lot of good caption suggestions, but Paul chose Jason Cohen’s “Selling is really about getting your arms around their heads and blowing your features into their brains.” quote as the best one. So, we thought it would be only fitting to make Jason’s “prize” a starring role in the next caption contest 🙂

Jason is the founder of Smart Bear Software and WPEngine, and has been a BoS speaker for the last three years.

Leave your caption suggestions in the comments below.

Image credit: ©John M. P. Knox

This is a guest post from Jonathan Alexander. Jonathan is VP Engineering at Vocalocity.  He is the author of Codermetrics: Analytics for Improving Software Teams published by O’Reilly in 2011.

Jonathan’s guest post is on adapting honest, self-evaluation to measure your team.

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In the new book How Will You Measure Your Life? Clayton Christensen and his co-authors explain ways to measure whether we are on track for a happy and fulfilling life.  Using the methodology from Professor Christensen’s Harvard business school class, the book offers a set of questions and viewpoints that each person can apply independently to assess his or her life.  A key premise is that people get off track because they fail to evaluate themselves.

For those of us who work in teams, a similar problem exists.  By not identifying or evaluating the factors that make teams successful, we increase the likelihood that our teams will fail.

When someone suggests measuring teams, however, people’s eyes glaze over with thoughts of bureaucratic complexity.  It sounds like something we won’t like and don’t have time for.  But there is an easy way to measure teams based on a simple lesson from Christensen’s book:  honest self-evaluation is a powerful and accurate measurement technique.  The following outlines a simple way to apply this lesson to help your team navigate towards greater success.

Let Your Team Measure Itself

This exercise has three simple steps and for any small or modest-sized team can most likely be done in a one-hour meeting.  It’s ideal if your meeting room has a whiteboard or a projector, but if you don’t have these then just a laptop will suffice.  You’ll need a blank piece of paper for every team member, and pens or pencils.

Step One:  Brainstorm the Qualities Needed For Success

The first step is to determine what are the key factors that can or will make your team successful.  You can treat this as a brainstorming session, with an assigned scribe taking notes on the whiteboard or your laptop.  For each part of the brainstorming activity, you can use the “popcorn” method to determine when the brainstorming is done: as long as the ideas are coming quickly like kernels of corn rapidly popping, keep going, but when the pace slows down noticeably then you can move on.

Start by asking team members to share ideas of what “success” means for the team.  Of course this will differ based on the type of team.  For example, engineering teams will have different goals than marketing teams.  Encourage the team to not only think about business goals but also their own personal goals.  Also, consider both short-term and longer-term goals.  So the list might include tangible targets like new customers or revenues or reduced quality problems, but also intangibles like having a fun workplace or continued education and career growth.

Once you have captured a list of ideas about what team success means and listed them on the whiteboard or projector, continue the brainstorming session by asking team members to identify individual qualities that are required to achieve the kinds of success listed.  The scribe can write these down in a separate area, maybe next to or below the previous list.  The new list might include a wide variety of qualities like effort, accuracy, communication, teamwork, mentoring, or poise under pressure.

The final part of the brainstorming is to determine which are the most important qualities among those listed.  To do this, ask team members to vote by a show of hands for their top three or four qualities, and tally the results.  Use the results to narrow down the list to those receiving the most votes.  As a general guideline the “top list” should include at least three qualities, but for this exercise it is probably good if it includes at least five and maybe even more based on the voting and your judgement.

Step Two:  Let Individuals Rate Themselves

At the end of step one you will have a team-identified top list of individual qualities that drive team success.  Now you are ready to move to the second step.

Ask every team member to take a piece of paper and write down the top list of qualities that you as a group have agreed upon.  Then ask each person to rate themselves on a scale of 1 to 5 (1 being “poor” and 5 being “excellent”) for each of those qualities.  Names should not be written down; the ratings are anonymous in order to encourage everyone to provide an honest self-evaluation with no fear of judgement or repercussions.

After everyone has rated themselves for each quality, ask them to identify the quality which is their strongest and the quality which is their weakest.  This may be difficult, since many people will see themselves as equal in various qualities, but ask everyone to choose.  They can identify these on the paper with plus and minus signs next to their strongest and weakest qualities.

You might wonder whether this self-rating system is “valid” and “fair” since you don’t know that people rate themselves with equal severity.  But the usefulness of these ratings isn’t the exact numbers, but the relative differences they reveal.  For example, if one person rates herself 5-4-3 for three qualities and another rates herself 4-3-2, it’s not important whether the first person is actually “better” in any of the qualities than the second.  What’s important is that they both rated themselves stronger for the first quality and weaker for the last.  As long as people’s rating scales are “consistent” for themselves, which we can reasonably assume will be the case, then the self-rating technique is useful.

Step Three:  Use Self-Ratings to Identify The Team’s Strengths and Weaknesses

The third and final step of the team meeting is to collect the individual papers and calculate the results.  Using the whiteboard or a simple spreadsheet, you can calculate two numbers for each of the key qualities that your team identified as important to team success:

• Team Average:  sum the ratings (1 to 5) that individuals gave themselves for each quality and then divide by the number of team members to get the average
• Plus-Minus:  count the number of individuals that rated themselves strongest for each quality and then subtract from that the number of individuals who rated themselves the weakest for that quality (result may be positive, zero, or negative number)

When complete, for every quality you will have a Team Average and a Plus-Minus.  The qualities with higher numbers are the team’s self-identified strengths, and the qualities with the lower numbers are the team’s self-identified weaknesses.  The actual numbers themselves aren’t really important or meaningful, but the relative differences are, especially if there are big differences for one or more qualities.

Apply What You Learn

How is this useful?  First of all, the process and results may spur useful conversation and self-reflection among team members.  Thinking about what success means, what it takes, and how each person is contributing may cause team members to think more about how they can improve.  You might, for example, finish the meeting by discussing what the team can do to strengthen areas that you identified as weakest.

Team managers might also reflect on this information afterwards to find ways to strengthen the team.  For example, if the team identified communication as one of its weaker qualities, you could think about improving opportunities for interaction (such as team lunches or other informal gatherings).  The balance of strengths and weaknesses might also influence the type of mentoring or training you pursue, or the type of people that you seek to add to the team.

If you already have an annual performance review process, you may already be capturing self-rating data similar to this, and you might get similar benefits from cumulative analysis of those results.  But if you don’t already have such a process, or even as an extra exercise to facilitate team-building, a session of honest self-evaluation can be as worthwhile and healthy for any team as it can be for every individual.

This is a guest post from Joe Corkery. Joe is Vice President of Business Development at OpenEye Scientific Software in Cambridge, MA. Remarkably, Joe has been with OpenEye for nearly 13 years helping it grow from 3 people to over 40 at last count. In an earlier life, Joe ran away from writing code to attend medical school, only to be drawn back in after graduation. Despite not having access to a prescription pad, he is passionate about drug discovery and the impact computers have on that process, among others.

Joe gave a Lightning Talk at Business of Software 2010, and he was gracious enough to share his experience with us. If you’re still not sure why you should give a Lightning Talk, take a look at what he has to say. Thanks for sharing, Joe!

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With the deadline for Lightning Talk submissions rapidly approaching (midnight on July 29th), I thought I’d offer a little perspective on why you should be giving a Lightning Talk.

Giving a Lightning Talk is without a doubt an unnerving experience, but giving one at Business of Software is terrifying because it’s not your average audience. The audience is filled with not only your peers, but also your idols, and a large number of other software rock stars that you just haven’t heard of yet. However, despite the boot-shaking terror that came with giving a Lightning Talk at BoS 2010, it was far and away the best thing I did at that meeting and it continues to pay dividends to this day.

If you aren’t familiar with the concept of Lightning Talks, they are very short time-constrained talks in which you are allowed 7.5 minutes to cover 15 slides (each of which will be automatically advanced every 30 seconds). After all the talks have been given (there are usually between 5-10), the audience votes on the best talk. The winner receives bragging rights, an invitation to the speakers’ dinner and whatever cool electronic gadget happens to be in vogue that year. Winners from previous years have also gone on to give regular talks in the subsequent year’s meeting.

Even if you don’t win (which sadly I didn’t), giving a Lightning Talk provides you with an unprecedented opportunity to meet people at the conference (which if that isn’t your goal in coming to the meeting, you ought to rethink your goals), both before and especially after you give your talk. The fact that you are giving a Lightning Talk is a remarkable conversation icebreaker, particularly at the Sunday night cocktail reception. This is particularly helpful if you aren’t naturally social and can never find the right topic to start a conversation, because the Lightning Talk will do it for you. Mark Stephens (the winner from BoS 2009) helped me (and a few others) out in this regard by introducing us to other groups by name, mentioning the fact that we were giving Lightning Talks, and then letting the conversation take off from there. Most people you will meet will generally be in awe that you’ve agreed to subject yourself to this strange form of torture and will really want to talk to you about it. What’s even better is that because you are putting yourself out there as an opportunity for their schadenfraude, people are much more likely to remember you both during and after the meeting as a result. I was truly amazed by the number of people (including a few of the real speakers) that remembered me at BoS 2011 because of it – it was a great way to start a new meeting.

But don’t forget the other presenters – there is nothing quite like a shared challenge to bring people together and build camaraderie. I still try to make a point of keeping up with a number of my fellow speakers and look forward to seeing them again at the meeting this year.

Beyond meeting new people, the Lightning Talk gives you a rare opportunity to spend time thinking about a specific topic of your own choosing and distilling it down into something you can quickly and effectively communicate to others. I can’t underestimate the importance of this skill and what better way to hone that than by sharing a relevant passion with an open and like-minded audience. Amazingly enough, they let me talk about how Viagra could teach us something about the software business (and it’s not how you think)! The story is a medical version of a business model pivot. Ask me about it at the Sunday night reception.

One of the biggest obstacles to participation is clearly the fear of having to speak on someone else’s clock. And it should be a fear, because it is a serious challenge. Watching the countdown clock staring you in the face really brings it home during the talk. However, with a lot of preparation (about which I’ll write a separate post later), you can definitely do it (and do it well) if you are willing to put in the time. But, even if you don’t pull it off without a hitch, you will still have the respect of all the other attendees for trying and with this crowd, that isn’t nothing.

Finally, if I haven’t convinced you to give this a try yet, how about this: the conference fee for Lightning Talk speakers is waived. So, if you’re just starting up and aren’t sure you can afford to come to the meeting or if you’re at a larger company that is just too lame to pay for you to attend, this is a great way to get a spot at the meeting.

Photo courtesy of Betsy Weber

So now, my question to you is, why aren’t you fighting for a spot to give a Lightning Talk at this meeting? Just writing about it has made me excited for the conference; perhaps, I should throw my hat into the ring again and give a meta-Lightning Talk on why it should be you on the stage and not me! For more details on how to apply to do a Lightning Talk, go here. See you in October!

This is a guest post from Ricardo D. Sanchez. Ricardo is a software engineer working for HomeAway in Austin, TX. He is an aspiring entrepreneur working nights and weekends on his software startup, Palo Software. He is also passionate about bringing techies and entrepreneurs together, something he is able to do with his blog and his Co-Founders Wanted Austin Meetup group. His meetup group helps Austin tech entrepreneurs find co-founders and network with other local entrepreneurs and techies.

Thanks for this nice guest post on finding talent, Ricardo!

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The talk from Business of Software 2010 by David Russo on why company culture matters, got me thinking about startup hiring principles in general. Below is one of my favorite quotes from his talk:

Don’t hire great people, hire the right great people, they have to fit.

It is not a secret that finding talent is a very difficult task, companies pay extraordinary amounts of money to recruiters and consultants to help them find the right people. Many companies also offer referral bonuses to its employees to motivate them to refer friends or family members that might be qualified for an open position.

Depending on where you live, you’ll find that companies are in need of people with different skills. In cities such as Austin and San Francisco for example, software engineers and designers are currently in high demand. I live in Austin and for the past two years have experienced an increase in the number of companies looking for software engineers, database administrators, UI designers, etc… I have seen how companies are increasing their referral bonuses, sponsorships and participating in more local events and meetups with the goal to gain exposure and hopefully be more visible to those out there looking for a job in the positions mentioned above.

Having a fun and relaxed environment is also something that more companies are finally understanding and many of them are now investing resources to make their companies fun and cool to attract the talent. Culture is an important part if you want to attract the best talent, people in general seem to be attracted to companies where people are trusted and valued for what they are and for the job they do. Companies with a little or no bureaucracy and very little red-tape will be more attractive to bright people as opposed to companies with many layers of management and lots of red-tape.

Companies that encourage their employees to show their individualism and creativity, where dress-code policies do not exist and everyone is treated as adults and are given the responsibility and power to do their jobs usually make for a very attractive place where many people will be motivated to work and on top of that be more productive and be more happy in general.

Given the freedom to do so, creative passionate people will drive innovation in any company out there. Innovation is not something that can be taught or forced in a company, it is the result of people being able to express their ideas and creativity in a way that can be used to improve a product, a service or a process within a company.

Software startups are usually very popular with young talent and entrepreneur-minded individuals due to the relaxed environments with challenging work, high risk and the potential to learn a lot and get a nice financial reward as well. Most software startups fail but people who get a chance to work on one, usually gain very valuable experience and overall the experience can help make their skills more marketable to other companies or startups alike.

However, finding the right technical talent for your company or startup is not an easy task. Established companies offer nice compensation packages, medical insurance and the resources necessary to do the job. Software startups offer big challenges, ability to work with very creative people, and sometimes the potential for a financial reward as long as the startup ends up having a successful exit or becomes a profitable company.

These are some things that startups and companies in general should be doing to make sure they get that person or people with the right talent and personality to get things done. The tips below work very well when looking for software engineers, DBAs, designers and professionals with similar technical skills:

• Google Groups

Search for Google groups about topics that involve some of the skills that you are looking for, for example, if you are looking for Python developers you should go and look at the people who hang out in these groups, look for the ones that are most active and interested in the topic. Look for top commenters.

• Technical Blogs

Popular technical blogs are places where technical people go to read and comment on a variety of topics. Subscribing to a few of these blogs will give you the opportunity to find and interact with people who are interested on some of the topics that involve the position that you are hiring for and also the ability to interact with some of them, including the experts who write and also comment in these blogs. Also, having a blog for your startup is also a good idea since you can use it to communicate with potential and existing customers and also as a hiring tool.

• Twitter and Google+

Not all of the social media sites and services are a waste of time. It turns out that services such as Twitter and Google+ offer a great opportunity to find very talented people and at the same time, you might gain some insight on the personality and experience of people that might be interested in offering a job at your company or startup.

• Meetups and tech events

If you are not part of meetup.com you are missing out. Search for meetups targeted to technical people and join these groups to observe and potentially find great candidates with technical backgrounds to work at your company or even help you to co-found a new startup as a technical co-founder. Meetups are also a great way to just be part of a local group of talented people that meet regularly and in-person with the intention to learn, meet new people and sometimes to find a job or join a software/internet startup.

There is no doubt that hiring tech talent is one of the most difficult tasks for startups, with so many great companies working on very interesting problems it is hard to differentiate from all the other startups to attract talent. However, if you go back to basics and offer a flexible schedule, treat people as adults, allow them to be creative and offer them to choose the tools they need to do their job, that by itself will place you close to the top when it comes for these folks to pick a company to work for.

We know that some startups go to a lot of trouble to get to Business of Software. It is not cheap but those that get in tell us it is worth it.  (Please remember, BoS is not sponsored, our only income is from ticket sales). It is great to have some of the raw energy that people running startups, particularly their first startup, bring to the party. We also know that if you work in a small team and want to get the most out of the event, it is really worth getting along with a co-founder. We know of a few companies that take the founders to Business of Software and then take two days out of the office in the week of the conference to reset the priorities of their business.

(If you want to see who is coming to Business of Software this year, click here…

Business of Software Startup BOGOF

We want to put some places within reach of some founding teams of startups and offer them the opportunity to attend BoS with a co-founder.

We have a few places available to startup teams on a two tickets for the price of one basis.

You qualify if you:

• Are attending Business of Software for the first time.
• Have been incorporated since October 1st 2011.
• Really want to join our amazing community of software people.
• Are FULLY committed to the startup – it must be your primary job – not a side project, a full-on, full-time gig.

To secure a ‘Startup ‘Two for One’ places, register one place for yourself and drop us an email with your company details, we will send you a code to register the second place. If you have any doubt about whether you meet the criteria to qualify, please contact us directly to check.

By the way, if you’re a single founder, drop me a note, I will try to pair you up with a partner.

P.S. If you have already registered for Business of Software and feel this leaves you out, please let me know. We will apply the offer retrospectively.

A few people have asked who comes to Business of Software – is it startups or big companies (the price isn’t aimed at the startup world after all…)? The short answer is that there is a broad mix of people, one of the things that makes the event so special, but everyone has an interest in building long term, sustainable software businesses. See feedback from last year’s participants here.

I did a quick analysis of the registrations so far (just shy of 300), and this is what we know…

• Over half the attendees are from companies of between 11 and 200 people.
• The overwhelming majority of attendees are senior level people from micro- and growth ISVs.
• Just over half of the delegates at present have attended Business of Software previously.
• There is a single venture capital investor signed up thus far.

This is the Wordle of the 75 most common words in the attendee Job Titles. It does a pretty good job of representing the type of people  that will be coming.

We also ask people would like other to talk to them about at Business of Software (It appears on the badge). While some people insist on leaving it blank, this is what people are saying now:

• Measuring success.
• Large-scale engineering challenges
• E-commerce, site search, SaaS, SEO
• SharePoint + Enterprise Mobility Applications
• Lean Startups (especially within existing businesses)
• Mobile
• Scrum Software
• Finding the right market problems to solve
• How to build a community online and around your products and solutions
• Helping Communities Engage and Interact
• Programming & beer
• Brooklyn
• startups, bootstrapping, branding, africa
• finding the right talent to execute
• Working @ Stack Exchange!
• what cool things you are doing with “the cloud”.
• Scientific data and distributed data networks
• Channels
• Making the BUSINESS work.
• Infrastructure & Hosting
• Agile
• Selling your company
• TBD
• Letting go
• Competitive Analysis, Startups
• The Startup Owner’s Manual
• What you would like to do for the rest of your life.
• Things that make you happy.
• WordPress Hosting
• FoxPro, Germany
• Changing the world. One career at a time.
• 3D Modeling
• Could
• Startups, Web, JavaScript, HTML5
• What one thing you did this past year that had the biggest impact on your business
• Marketing
• Managing a buyout from parent company
• Managing ineffective boards
• Relativity
• Anything
• Continuous Delivery
• Chris Broshears Delivra
• windows phone 7crossfitSOA
• Email Marketing, Bootstrapping
• drinklobby
• This is my second startup.
• Apps For Kids
• New Ways to Work
• Organic Growth
• developer happiness.
• How much you spend on coffee every month?
• Anything
• Stuff
• Can I help you with Email Overload?
• Disruption of mainstream media by new media.
• Bootstrapping a company for over 6 years in NYC
• Scrum Software
• The future.
• All things Google
• Company Culture
• Product Management and how to build a platform to take over the world.
• Financing growth organically vs via investment
• Email
• Entrepreneurship, Investing
• Network Uptime
• Microsoft, Office, Large scale engineering challenges
• Selling for people who hate sales
• Virtual Phone Systems
• Inbound MarketingStartups
• Anything that Makes Your Company a Success!
• Growing a software group
• Challenges working with offshore teams
• Improving site SEO
• Growth through acquisition or sales growth?
• Scalability, Mobile
• Lean software development, PaaS
• Document Management, Technology, Aviation
• Ubuntu
• selling enterprise software online
• developer happiness.
• Challenging financial markets
• WordPress, Social Media, SEO
• Adobe AIR
• Project Sequencer
• Engagement Marketing
• Liverpool FC
• EgyptologyWorking with universitiesHaving a team on multiple continents
• Anything
• how to build a community online and around your products and solutions
• A technology enthusiast, sport addict, early adopter, nature and aerospace lover. Most of time BI consultant.
• Improving software sales
• Re-engineering products from on-premise to SaaS
• Helping Communities Engage and Interact
• Sales build or buy in Europe?
• Scrum Software
• Riding Bikes
• Europe and Asia
• High-frequency/wireless electronic design software
• Software for scientists.Working with outsourced programmers.Site licensing.
• Risk Management, ITIL, TOGAF
• HelpSpot
• Delphi
• Software DevelopmentHelp with tech team buildingPrototype to Production path
• Visual Communication
• Conference fear, humor, running, pragmatism vs negatism, my recent corporate move and adventures.
• Financial analytics
• Online Advertising
• Data Analysis
• Moving to the Mountains in WNC
• Making drugs
• Software components market, online marketing and how you want to takeover the world.
• Painless, Paperless Board Meetings
• The “right” way to validate a business idea.
• landscape photography
• Medical Imaging
• Sydney Australia, Lean startups, B2B, SaaS stuff
• budgeting. Or other stuff.
• ISV’s, WPF, Desktop Development
• Transitioning a company from services to products
• Eliminating paper processes through technology
• SEO, SaaS, ASP.NET
• Building an Enterprise Software Business
• Growing an Enterprise SaaS Company
• Marketing
• TEA or Coffee but TEA is my life!
• software product management
• Mobile Apps, Beer, Photography
• International expansion and transformation from on premise to SaaS
• Growing an Enterprise SaaS Company
• big ideas i can learn from
• Marketing
• Your dreams; your challenges; where you’re going.
• Design, User Experience, Entrepreneurship
• Anything under the sun
• Microsoft, Rails, Agile, Big Companies
• Please leave blank
• Changing enterprise software modells
• Cloud Databases
• Customer Succes, Retention and Engagement. Real-time In-App messaging based on behavior
• POS
• you
• Teaching, scaling infrastructure to millions of users, distributed source control, and sushi.
• Trello, FogBugz, and Kiln!
• Microsoft, social media, JavaScript
• Jobs to be done
• Helping Communities Engage and Interact
• Choosing global partners
• Next year’s Business of Software.
• Mobile apps
• Converting traffic into sales-ready leads
• String theory
• developer happiness.
• Email
• Startup Selling
• rural entrepreneurshipAlabama Football
• Helping Communities Engage and Interact
• Growth
• My life as a consultant
• Please leave blank
• Virtual Phone Systems
• Community Web Sites
• Marketing
• Agile Development
• Your pain with email volumes, mobile applications, startup, inbound marketing, getting useful stuff coded faster, …
• Anything
• Hacker News, web dev
• Managing virtual boards
• Your favorite interview question.
• Continuous deployment, hiring, wine.
• AuditShark
• Data and visualization for the non-developer
• Neil BermanDelivra
• Branding, Customer Acquisition & Finding balance as a working mom
• Bootstrapping profitable web apps
• Managing virtual teams
• Best practice for scaling customer service globally
• IPO market in Europe
• Managing alpha personalities
• Product Management
• International distribution
• The business of software
• Programming for Kids
• Anything
• APIs
• Mobile apps
• Growing your business
• Mobile app biz.
• Making events more memorable
• Email
• Sales
• organic growth
• Technology, education, managing tech teams
• Ruby/Rails
• Disruptive cancer startups.
• Why is shipping software so hard?
• Everything
• Startups, VC, Web/Mobile, Hacker News, Tennis, Beer
• Reducing administriviaHiring geeks
• Black Bear Ops
• I’m a product-tech-business-healthcare guy
• Continuous deployment, hiring, wine.
• Computer Assisted Document Review (Predictive Coding)
• Amazing customer service experiences.
• Boot-strapping a business.
• Product Management ERP Systems
• Desktop software!
• Address management & validation
• Licensing Protection, Remote Support and anything about software
• Channels
• Helping Communities Engage and Interact
• Impact of Mobile
• Performance
• ERP and Saas
• Bootstrapping
• Snowboarding!
• ProProfs.com, Freemium, SAAS, Web Apps
• design, data or development
• Deployment Automation
• Helping Communities Engage and Interact
• Mobile
• your software engineering challenges.
• Life
• Organisational culture
• Your great new company
• Creating awesome user experiences for affinity groups.
• International expansion and transformation from on premise to SaaS
• Software
• Anything (I have domain knowledge in both licensing — a.k.a. anti-piracy — and update software).
• Custom software development
• Your first startup
• Cloud marketing, basketball.
• TBD
• My favorite speaker so far…
• What’s the next paradoxical truth that will change the world?
• Innovation, creativity, software, marketing, folk music, dancing, bagpipes
• Building a software business
• Machine learning
• Rhino 3D
• SaaS
• Interacting with your customers via Mobile
• Small start-ups
• Github
• Understanding fund raising
• Anything that’s on your mind:)
• lean decisions, heat maps, life hacking
• bootstrapping
• Packaging CAD Software
• Everything!
• Cool stuff
• Global marketing
• the important elements of growing a software business
• Budgeting
• Alternative sources of venture funding
• Debt as finance
• Burritos
• Helping Communities Engage and Interact
• Growing culture across borders

We will update people nearer the time though we will only share the attendee list with the other attendees.