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.

A week ago I was sitting on the patio of the InterContinental Hotel in Boston as we did some reconnaissance for BoS2012. It sits next to an historic place – the site of the Boston Tea Party (the boats in the picture below are replicas of the original, located on the site where the process of American Independence started). Quite a place. We can’t wait to be back for Business of Software in October. Happy 4th July American friends.

Speaker Update The big speaker news this month is the incredible Dan Pink is confirmed as a speaker on the final day. Dan, was recognized as one of the leading business thinkers in the world last year alongside Professor Clayton Christensen. He is a reformed lawyer, political speechwriter and author of three New York times bestselling books including Drive – the Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. I’m excited about having Dan speak as his new project addresses an ongoing BoS theme – sales. I don’t want to spoil his surprise – Dan is offering us a sneak preview in advance of publication – but expect your perception of sales to change – radically.

Lightning Talks If you’re interested in delivering a Lightning Talk this year, please submit your proposal, ideally via video, by 29th July. Lightning Talk speakers get a free pass to the conference, though they often spend most of the time practicing their talk. More information about Lightning Talks here.

EARLY BIRD Bonus – next 50 registrations get a free copy of Dan Pink’s book.

• Don’t forget, you can save $700 on the full price of conference attendance if you register by 10th July.
• As a little extra bonus, we are going to send the next 50 attendees a copy of Dan Pink’s excellent book, Drive, with our compliments.

Here are some of the things you might have missed if you don’t check the blog regularly:

• If you want to know why people come and what they get out of being a part of the extraordinary BoS community, the feedback from delegates at last year’s event puts it far better than I ever could. Some of the words that made BoS worthwhile for us.
• My musings on the spread of Lean Principles into the Enterprise. Geoffrey Moore, a Business of Software speaker and long time hero, described it as a, ‘Great read’. I felt like a small child who had just been praised by his favourite teacher. The Lean Startup virus mutates into virulent Enterprise form.
• Continuing the ‘Lean’ theme, Joca Torres, a Brazilian BoSer has a really great read (and some great diagrams) explaining the three most important reasons you should get your MVP out there – NOW. Why the hurry to launch your MVP?
• Sales. Paul Kenny is the one person I know who can get software geeks excited about sales. Don’t miss his talk (with transcript) on closing the deal. The Art of Asking.

All the talks from last year can be accessed from here with a pass code. Attendees for BoS 2012 also receive a code so they can see the full set of talks when they are registered for BoS2012. Other talks are posted over the course of the year – look forward to hearing from Jason Cohen talking about honesty in business at the weekend.

Please get in touch if you have any questions.

Food. Armies march on their stomachs and while we are not expecting any fighting at Business of Software this year, we are trying to make sure that the standard of food is as high as you would expect. We want to make sure there is good choice for everyone, especially the vegetarians.

Last week, Wendi, Anna and I spent some time picking through menus to make sure that everything is as you would expect. This is hard work and to prove it, here are a few of the things that were keeping us busy on your behalf – just some of the places we went in the quest for good research. We would recommend all of these establishments for different reasons except for the last one if you are a vegetarian.

InterContinental Hotel

InterContinental Asparagus Crown

It is the conference hotel so we are hoping the food might be good!

Testing a dessert trio. Not as easy as it looks, honest.

All very nice but the keen apiarists among our BoS throng will be delighted to know that the InterContinental Hotel is one of the very few large hotels to keep bees. They are thoughtfully kept in hives outside the bedrooms.

Bee Keeping at the InterContinental. Note respectful distance…

Julep Bar

Site of our Monday night event – food, music, dancing (if you insist), conversation and friendship. We want to make sure that everything is just right…

The things we do for you.

One important thing to note this year is that while we want to bring our own house band, we have got the use of two large, separate, rooms so whether you want to howl at the bass player, or chat quietly and cosily in a corner, there will be a place with your name on it.

It was only at the end of our visit that we noticed that ‘Chef Santos’ seemed to be pretty well known. Turns out he was one of the finalists on ‘Hell’s Kitchen’.

We think he is going to do us proud, but if he steps out of line, a dressing down from Wendi will make one of Gordon Ramsay’s outbursts seem like a nice chat with the Queen.

Chef Jason Santos, Hell’s Kitchen and BoS2012 Chef

Any man that makes his own tomato ketchup takes his food seriously. We are looking forward to seeing you in October Chef Santos.

Barking Crab

The Barking Crab is likely the place to go for a late evening drink if you don;t want to sit in the InterContinental.

Fenway Park – Baseball Park

Public Transport in the US is fairly limited.

Fenway Park: Meh. $9 for a Hot Dog! Won’t be in season for BoS2012.

Fenway Park. A HOT night in Boston.

The Mead Hall

Mead Hall Beer. Tasting, tasting, one-two-three.

This is in Cambridge, MA, and a 15 minute cab ride from the hotel but this place has more craft beers than I have ever tasted. Very thoughtfully, they offer you little tasting glasses to help you decide what you should drink. A great place for entrepreneurs to hang out.

And finally, no trip to America is complete without, a large steak.

Smith & Wollensky’s

Just round the corner from the InterContinental, this is probably one of the best chain steak houses in the US.

A small steak & two half portions of vegetables. Smith & Wollensky.

We ignored the apparent tastlessness of the sweet picture of Mary McCartney nestling inside her father Paul’s coat pocket taken by founder of Stella McCartney Foods that was displayed overlooking the main eating area. Now that, Alanis, is ironic.

Our work here is done.

We are looking forward to seeing you in October. Expect some good food along the way too – even the vegetarians!

If you have been to Business of Software before, you will know, Lightning Talks are an important part of the program. They follow a simple format – every speaker gets 15 slides and 30 seconds per slide to talk about a subject of their choice. The slides advance automatically. They also give some amazing people a platform to talk about a subject they really care about.

Health Warning: If you would like to do a Lightning Talk at Business of Software in 2012, you are probably clinically insane. However, sane or otherwise, if you want to do a Lightning Talk, here is what to do before Midnight PST, Sunday July 29th:

• Upload a video of yourself talking about what you would like to talk about in a Lightning Talk to YouTube or some swanky video hosting service like Blip.tv, Vimeo or whatever.
• The video should be between 2 and 4 minutes in length. Unless you indicate otherwise we will take submission as acceptance that the video may be published.
• Send us a note containing your contact details, with a link to the video, the title of your talk and a brief (max 100 words) description of the talk.
• We will review all of the submissions, and pick what we feel will be the most appropriate ones, to talk live at BoS 2012.
• Remember to submit by July 29th to: mark @ businessofsoftware.org
• (Please note submissions from third parties including marketing departments, speaking agents etc will be ignored – we don’t have the time – please see below).

IMPORTANT – DO NOT submit a Lightning Talk on behalf of anyone else especially if you are a Speaker Agent or PR agency working for a really important CEO. We only want submissions from people that care enough to do their own sutff. This is NOT a chance to shill your company, or a company/person you work for, this is a chance to stand up in front of a bunch of people and share an idea you love. The same principle applies to the main speaking slots at Business of Software.

Rewards Doing a Lightning talk at Business of Software is not easy but there are some advantages beyond the respect, adulation and recognition of your peers at the conference and watching on the Live Stream.

• Every submission to deliver a Lightning Talk that is accepted will be given a free pass to the Business of Software Conference.
• You will be treated with reverence whilst you are there.
• The ‘winning’ Lightning Talk, as chosen by the votes of our attendees, will receive a small, electronic-based, prize.
• You will remember it for the rest of your life.

Remember though, this is the worst way to get a free pass to Business of Software.

To get your creative juices flowing, here are the previous winners:

• Business of Software 2011. Justin Goeres, ‘Getting to Nowhere‘ (You can also see all last year’s talks here too).
• Business of Software 2010. Patrick McKenzie, ‘Hello Ladies’
• Business of Software 2009. Mark Stephens, ‘Are you a large lizard or small and furry?’
• Business of Software 2008. Alex Ohanian, ‘Keeping it Real’

Even if you don’t submit an idea, why not think about what you would talk about in 7.5 minutes? Strange as this might sound, lots of our attendees do, even if they have no interest in standing on stage. Thinking about the essence of what you are passionate about can be a very good way of helping you work out what is important to you.

• Remember to submit by July 29th to: mark @ businessofsoftware.org

Inspired by this giant Infographic about the effective use of email, we thought we would come up with our own rule. As over 30% of marketing emails are opened on mobile devices, (and rising), you need to know this. We don’t understand why this needs a graphic. Ironically, this would fail just about every rule that it sets for sending to mobile phones.

Our Rule: Get to the point. Use text.

So the one simple rule for effective mobile email: Get to the point. Use text.

Time for some fun!

We decided to run a caption contest to highlight some of the more interesting photos from Business of Software 2011.

The first victim lucky participant in the series is Paul Kenny of Ocean Learning, and a regular Business of Software speaker. If you attended Business of Software last year or are already registered for this year’s conference, you can access Paul’s 2011 talk from here using the passcode you were provided.

Leave your caption suggestions in the comments below.

Many thanks to Betsy Weber for being the official unofficial BoS photographer.

This is a guest post from Joca Torres. Joca is the director of product development and product management at Locaweb, Brazil’s leader in web hosting, cloud servers and SaaS applications like email marketing and online stores, serving more than 250,000 customers. His first startup experience was in the early 1990s when he founded and ran one of the first Brazilian ISPs. He has been working with internet related software ever since.

I met Joca at Business of Software last year, and we had a great discussion on ways to monetize consumer SaaS apps. Joca recently wrote a book in Portuguese on how startups can create and manage profitable web products, and he was kind enough to translate a section of it for us. We may even convince him to translate a few more sections for us 🙂 Thanks Joca!

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I just finished writing a book in Portuguese called “The Startup Guide: how startups and established companies can create and manage profitable web products”. The book is focused on how any type of company – no matter if it’s a startup or an established company – can create and profitably manage a web software. The book is about to be published in Brazil in July or August, but I already posted all it’s content at the “Guia da Startup” blog. It’s currently in Portuguese so it’s a good opportunity for you to practice reading in a new language. If you are not up-to-date with your Portuguese skills, there’s only the option of using Google Translate. I’ll translate the content into English eventually.

One of the most popular posts from this blog is about the reasons to make fast the first version of your product. Why do we need to make an MVP? Why not wait to have the product with more features to launch it? David Cancel, VP Product at Hubspot, mentioned in his BoS 2011 presentation the famous phrase by Herb Kelleher, co-founder and former CEO of Southwest Airlines:

“We have a ‘strategic plan.’ It’s called doing things.”

David even mentioned the #jfdi hashtag which means something in the lines of “just focus and do it” or “just freakin’ do it” (polite form).

But why the hurry? Why can’t we keep working on our product until we feel comfortable it has all the features we believe are needed to solve the user’s problem?

Well, there are 3 main reasons:

Reason #1: The moment of truth!

The longer you take to put your product in front of real users, the longer you take to start getting feedback from real people to know if you’re on the right track. And what’s even worse, you’ll probably be giving too many steps in the wrong direction.

A software is supposed to solve a certain problem of its users. You will not know if you have built a good product until the product is used by real users and it actually solves one of their problems. The longer it takes for this to happen, the longer it will take for you to know if your product is or is not the solution for someone’s problem.

And if it is not, what should you do? Change, adapt and present it again to real users! The sooner you know that what you’re developing is not on track, the better, because you’ll have spent less time, energy and money moving into the wrong direction.

Reason #2: Featuritis

There’s a limit to the number of features a user can understand. When we present a software full of features to a potential user, instead of providing her with a possible solution to one of her problems, we may end up creating a new problem for her. Kathy Sierra, a well known software development and user experience instructor [editor’s note: and BoS speaker], designed the Featuritis Curve that illustrates in a clear and fun way how user satisfaction diminishes as we increase the number of features of a product.

Reason #3: ROI

The longer you take to put your product in front of real users, the longer it will take for you get some revenue and the longer you’ll have to invest from your own money or investor’s money. Below is a typical return on investment chart. While you don’t launch your product and don’t have revenue, all you’ll have are costs, i.e., you’ll be in the investment phase of the curve below. This situation will only change when you get some revenue and this revenue pays your monthly costs. This is the monthly profitability phase in the chart. Only after a few months in the monthly profitability phase you’ll be able to get to the return on investment phase. It’s a long way:

Now take a look at the chart below. If you decide to delay your launch in 3 months, this can delay your return on investment in 6 months! Are the features that you intend to implement in those 3 months you are delaying the product launch worth the 6 months delay to get to the return on investment phase?

On the other hand, if you are able to launch 3 months sooner than what’s described in the first chart, you’ll get into the return on investment phase 6 months sooner. Isn’t that worth figuring out how to launch your product faster?

If you’re not embarrassed…

There is a famous quote by Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, which really resonates with the MVP concept:

“If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”

To illustrate this quote, here are some print screens of early versions of well known software products:

Google in 1998

Twitter in 2006

Linkedin in 2005

Facebook login screen in 2005

Facebook in 2005

Next Steps

Last year I decided to run a lean startup experiment. Would it be possible to build a software and market it without using Locaweb’s marketing power? The result of this experiment is a calorie counter web product with more than 17,000 registered users in less than one year of operation. In my next post I’ll explain how I built the MVP of this product in 10 days.

Appreciate all the feedback via the blog, email and twitter about the new website. You will  see some changes already and more in the offing. We are particularly keen to make sure that video content is easy to find.

Congratulations to Matthew Lam, who wins the case of Soda Pop Sodas. Matthew, please email me your mailing address so we can send it off to you. Thank you.

The extra copies of Clayton Christensen’s book, ‘How will you measure your life?’ have been sent off to registrants this week and we have had some great feedback from some of the people who received the original batch. If anyone felt like running a quick review for the blog, would be interested to know what you thought.