Multipack Presents, February 2012 Writeup

On Saturday, I attended the first Multipack Presents event of 2012 in Birmingham. It was a great day full of interesting topics and presentations, and many geeky conversations over a beer.

The general theme was about converting side projects into a business, with many of the presentations focusing on the speakers personal experience of converting a side project into their full time job. One of the points made very early on, was that we’re fortunate enough to work in an industry where we’re very passionate about what we do, however that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to push that further.

Below is a summary of the various talks, but I’ve also added my own thoughts and extended some of the points made, although not changing the original message of the speaker.

Lessons learned from Buffer — Joel Gascoine

Buffer is an application which lets you queue up numerous messages/statuses and have them posted to Twitter or Facebook throughout the day. Throughout the talk, Joel shared some of the lessons he’d learnt from launching Buffer.

Share progress and be open

Many people working on a startup are afraid to share anything before they launch, as they might feel it will compromise their position, by giving away too much information to potential competitors. Joel argues that sharing as much as possible is in your best interest, as it will get customers on board and provide valuable feedback, both of the validity of the idea, and the commercial viability of it.

Work on the side

By working on your startup idea in your spare time, while still having a job, means you don’t need t worry about generating revenue from the very beginning. This isn’t to say you don’t need some sort of plan for generating revenue it he future, but it’s ok to not make money on day 1.

Test assumptions

It’s far too easy to come up with an idea, it’s much harder to come up with an idea that is feasible and commercially viable. One of the tactics Joel used to test the validity of their idea, was to make the landing page for Buffer look like a real product, and monitor the number of users that clicked to the sign up page. At this point, their email address was captured.
After the initial feasibility was validated, they tested if people we’re willing to pay, by going to a pricing page. Most users selected the free option, but some chose the premium tiers. All options again ended up at a data capture page saying the web app isn’t quite finished.

Talk to your customers

For the first few hundred customers, Joel would personally email each of them, and find out about their needs. This gave them valuable night when developing and launching the product, and further validated the need for it. Also, this is something you can afford to do when starting up, and don’t have thousands of customers to worry about.

Turning a side project into a side business — Elliot Jay Stocks

Elliot’s talk was about the 8 Faces magazine, specifically about how it went from an experimental side project into a stand along business.

Elliot made a number of key points, but some of the key ones that stood out for me were:

It’s not wrong to want to make money

Some people think that wanting to make money is a bad thing, and that it’s evil and greedy – but it’s not! We’re all fortunate enough to get paid to do what we love, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The problem is, when you do something purely to make money, as oppose to a true love for it. This ties in with a point Elliot made later – Money should be a bi-product.

Minimise risk

The cost of a startup, especially an online one has dropped dramatically. Although there is a cost in terms of time, it’s not an upfront out cost, especially if you build your startup on the side. Elliot managed to minimise the risk by getting sponsors on board, which covered the up front production costs. This meant that every issue sold was profit (minus variable costs such as postage, but they’re no risk, as you only incur it once having sold the magazine).

The majority of adverts fail due to relevance

This refers to adverts you place in your product in an attempt to monetize it, not adverts leading to your product. Generic adverts in a generic product, targeted at a generic audience will fail. Adverts work best when targeted on a niche, such as in this case, typography.
Tis is beneficial for both the companies placing the adverts, as all as the customer, as the advert isn’t a detriment to the product, but something that is likely to be relevant.

Grassroots advertising works

When Elliot launched 8 faces, the only marketing was in the form of tweets and blog posts. These then spread throughout the community resulting in significant exposure. This was obviously aided by Elliot’s high profile within the community, but for anyone else, the same process would work, but would take longer.

What a difference a day makes — Steve Hayes

This presentation was about Steve’s experience of having dedicated time at work for side projects. This concept is not new, and is most famous in the form off Googles 20% times, where staff can spend 1 day per week on personal projects.

Scratch your own itch

Almost every successful web app started from solving a problem the founders would face on a regular basis. If you face a problem there’s a significant chance that you’re not the only one, and that others out there would be willing to pay for a solution to that problem.
By doing something to solve your problem, it means you’re passionate about it, and that will show in the end product, unlike if your sole motivation is money.

Competition isn’t bad

It’s far too simple to dismiss an idea because it already exists, but competition isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as it proves there is a demand in that market for that product/service. There are for example numerous web based project management systems, which proves both demand and profitability within that market.
This does not however mean you can just clone an existing startup and be a success. You need to in some way differentiate yourself from the rest of the market.

Launch a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

A key part of the agile methodology is about releasing early and releasing often. This doesn’t mean that the first iteration of a project should be full f bugs, but that it should only have the very minimum functionality needed for it to fulfil its purpose.
The other benefit of this, is that you can both test the validity of your idea, and start getting feedback fro your users much sooner.

Learn from my mistakes — Richard Cunningham

No one is perfect, and Richards talk uses this to show some of the mistakes he made when working on a startup, and more importantly, the messing learned.

Taking too long to launch

Richard took nearly 2 and a half years before a public launch, with half that time spent in a private beta. Richard now recommends aiming to launch the MVP in about one month with just one killer feature.
He also recommends not having a public private beta, but at most do 2 weeks of internal beta testing.

Making it too complicated

It’s far too easy to get carried away and add needless features to your product. This not only adds bloat for the end user, but it also introduces needless complexity into the implementation of the product. It’s a lot more difficult to change the direction of a product which is full of complexity, so keep it simple. This goes hand in hand with the idea of the Minimum Viable Product.

No business model

As web designers and developers, it’s far too simple to dive right in and start building something awesome, and believe that if you build it, they will come (and if they come, they will pay). It’s ok to not make money on day 1, especially if you work on your startup in your spare time, but you need to have a long term plan to generate revenue, otherwise it won’t be a sustainable business. It’s also best to target a single type of user to pay, instead of trying to target everyone, as everyone is not your customer.

Tracking the wrong numbers

A lot of people would measure the success of a web application by the number of users that register, number of monthly page views etc. Although these can provide some insight, the key thing to track, is how your users interact with the site, and what features they use, not what they say they use.

Sticking with the same idea

It’s far to each to get so into an idea after working on it for some time, to not realise if it’s no longer relevant. It can be hard to throw away all that investment in terms of time, but not doing so can be harmful to you. There are two things you can do to limit the chance of this happening:

Release early, so that you get real world feedback as early as possible, and if you need to scrap the project or change direction, you minimise the amount of investment you “throw away”
Remove complexity, so that you can easily change the direction of the project

Afraid of competition

As previously mentioned, competition is not necessarilya bad thing, as it proves demand for that product/service in the market. Additionally, there are still plenty of potential users out there which aren’t using your product or your competitors, and it’s much easier to target these, especially if you have a clear advantage over your competition.

Frittr — Tom Ashworth

Frittr is a very simple web application designed to help you track what you spend, and is built using NodeJS, MongoDB and Heroku. Toms talk was a very high level overview of each of these, and an attempt to get others to realise this stack may also be of use for others side projects.

NodeJS

NodeJS is an asynchronous, event driven, light weight JavaScript server. This is great for performance and scalability, although the asynchronous nature of it does take some getting used to! Simplify the problem as much as possible to eliminate this complexity and things will start to make sense.

MongoDB

Mongo is a scalable, document oriented NoSQL data store, most commonly used for storing JSON object. It support dynamic schemas, which makes it incredibly simple to evolve an application. It’s particularly useful when storing data from third party services, as you don’t need to worry about the structure of the data changing, as long as the key “columns” that you need are consistent.

Heroku

Heroku is a cloud application platform where you can deploy NodeJS apps, as well as Ruby, Java and Python. It takes care of almost everything, so you can focus on building something awesome, and easily deploy it using Git Push. Tom even mentions that in many cases (such as his), you can get away with the free tier, therefore minimising the up front risk.

Stuff Google Maps — Peter Lancaster

Peter talked about an Open Source alternative to Google Maps called Open Street Map and Open Layers. He show examples of it in action and why it’s a good alternative to Google Maps.

Personally, I love Google Maps — I think it’s a great service, and is free… At least for me. It seem that for high traffic usage (over 25,000 maps/day), you need to pay (currently $4/1000 extra maps views). This limit some something which will almost never affect me, as maps don’t tend to be at the centre of the things I build, but if you use them heavily, then you may want to check out Open Street Maps.

The next steps are to make this Open Source alternative better known, and easier for others to use on their own sites. To do this, they’re currently working on a WordPress theme which will integrate numerous bits of mapping functionality.

The power of sidelines — Rachel McColin

Rachel gave a personal tale of her progressing from full time job, to freelancing part time, to freelancing full time, speaking at events in her field and publishing a book. When Rachael started freelancing, she make mobile WordPress themes, just as the whole responsive design thing was beginning to take off. By being early to the market, she was able to carve out a niche and make a name for herself.

Take and make opportunities

It’s possible to go years and years, without feeling as if you’ve really achieved anything or made a difference. As far as the industry cares, you just a developer/designer without a name. But every now and again, an opportunity will come up, and you have to jump in and take it. In Rachel’s case, it was an opportunity to write a book on Mobile WordPress.

However what do you do if an opportunity doesn’t come along? You need to make one for yourself. The more content you create and put out there, the more blog posts and tutorials you write, and the more conferences you attend, or even speak at, you will start to establish a name for yourself, and then other opportunities will snowball.

Web Apps on Mobile — Stuart Langridge

Stuart gave a very opinionated presentation on the battle between native mobile applications and web applications optimised for mobile. Some of the key arguments why we should be building mobile optimised websites instead of native apps included:

One site, many platforms

If you build a mobile web site, it will work on iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone and any other mobile operating system out there, with no extra work. To deploy a mobile application to the same platforms, you would either need to create and maintain several versions of the same application, or cross compile them using a third party tool, such as Phone Gap.

Instant deployment and updates

If you want to release an application of the App Store, you need to wait days/weeks for it to be approved. Need to push out an update? That’ll be a few more days/weeks in the approval system. If on the other hand, you’re using a mobile web app, you just need to push the change to the web server, and everyone will see it next time they access your site.

Use technologies we already know

If you want to develop native apps for iOS, you’ll need to learn Objective-C, or Java to create native Android apps. To develop a mobile web application, you just need the tools you already know and use on a daily basis — HTML, CSS and JavaScript. This means you can get something out there much sooner, as you don’t need to keep learning new technologies to deploy to new platforms.

Almost everything you need can be done via a browser

The web has come on a long way, and you can do almost anything you could with native APIs within the browser. Need offline support? Use local storage. Need location data? Use the geolocation API. Need to access the accelerometer? Modern browsers support this. There is very little you can’t do, and although not all mobile browsers currently support all the features, they’re constantly improving.

Revenue generation

This is the main point where things fall down a bit. iTunes makes it incredibly simple to purchase apps, using your payment details which they store — It eliminates the hassle and trust issues with supplying payment details to a third party. They do however help themselves to a nice chunk of your revenue for the privilege.

Subscription based apps can handle the recurring billing themselves, but there’s not currently a defacto standard for handling mobile payments, and this is a barrier for paid mobile web apps. Stuart reckons that until the mobile carriers get on board, and let you do mobile billing via your phone bill, this will remain the case.

Summary

Multipack presents was a fantastic event overall, and I look forward to the next one (where I might even present something). Some of the key messages I took away from it were:

Be passionate

Most successful web apps and startups are the result of scratching your own itch. Make something that solves a problem for you, be passionate about it, and even if it doesn’t work out, it will still have been a worthwhile experience.

Start on the side

You lose the freedom and security to experiment and try new things, if you’re relying on it to make enough money so that you can eat. Start off by working on it in the evenings and weekends and see where it takes you. And because you’re doing something you love (see above), you won’t even feel like you’re wasting your evenings and weekends away.

Talk to your users

Make sure you know who your target users are, and test your assumptions with them. Always be open and honest to them about what’s going on, and connect with them on a personal level… You’re just getting started, so you have no reason to not make a personal, lasting connection with the first few hundred users.

Competition isn’t a bad thing

Don’t be afraid of competition, as it proves the demand within the market. Find a way to differentiate yourself from them, find out what makes them successful, but don’t just clone them.

Launch early

Refine your idea to be as simple as it can be, while still being able to fulfil its key role. Strip away all complexity and get to market as soon as possible. Once there, you can refine your idea and get real world feedback.