The week before last at The Future of Web Apps I presented twice on “How to Turn Your App into a Money Making Business” and spoke on “Lessons Learned” closing panel. My business partner Steven, Dogster Inc.’s Chief Business Office did a straight hour on maximizing Direct Ad Sales and Sponsorship Programs to a room of furious note taking attendees. If I had videotaped the presentation I am positive it would have been requisite viewing for any consumer facing web company. I would strongly recommend he be invited to do a repeat performance soon.
Suw Charman and Stehanie Booth, both of whom I did not get to talk to enough, did verbatim transcriptions of my first session. Videos of all panels are forthcoming.
I met, spoke and heard many smart people you should add to your lists.
Umair Haque did a great presentation on the “edgeconomy“. I had the pleasure of speaking with him at length and always relish using the specifics of my internet experience as thought fodder for whip-smart tech-sociologists like Umair.
My old iconoclastic friend Craig Swann, founder/owner of Crash!Media was there. He’s been in Barcelona the last four years, doing amazing work for amazing clients. We first met at SXSW 2003, well before Dogster and Catster were even ideas. The design world will, I’m sure, benefit from his imminent move to NYC for a big new entertainment project. Best success with that Craig.
I (re)Met Deb Schultz, another social software smarty pants. It’s always so refreshing when I can converse with a peer where I can dive deep and explore the phenomena of our usage and not having to explain all the basics.
Ditto Thomas Vander Wal who I met for the first time and got to converse with a lot. He is a man with a lot of foresight about how all the bits fit together. If your company is seeking guidance on their social strategy you should retain him as a consultant. Spend a couple hours with him and Brian Oberkirch, another important social media mind and FOWA event chair, and you have a social software update akin to the McNeil/Leher NewsHour.
Erika Hall of Mule Design did a great presentation, “Copy is Interface” solidly instructing that perfect copy is just as important as graphic design and client-side UI when it comes to idyllic user experience. Considering how non-technical it is, I would say that good copy is the most valuable weapon in your arsenal. Changing text is the easiest thing you can do, and the change users accept with the least resistance. Every single word read by your visitors creates a powerful moment that cannot be wasted. I also got to speak with Mule partner and husband Mike Monteiro for the first time. Having left my web development company behind, I was very interested to hear about the current state of web design business.
I saw Matt Biddulph speak about Dopplr, a new geek fave for sharing travel plans. He struck me as brilliant at extracting network logic from the presentation layer by using net-abstracted functionality (such as shared login, API, friend networks), but I would have liked to hear more about how this will be a business.
Robin Kalin of Etsy gave a memorable, if off-the-cuff presentation. Etsy is building what appears to be a very solid business by creating a large marketplace for sellers and buyers of indie crafts and limited edition clothing and accessories. Etsy, however, aspires to significantly disrupt today’s mass-market distribution system by offering the platform and guiding producers how to use it for profit. I’m not sure if Etsy’s model of creating a vibrant community-style marketplace will work beyond personally made and sourced goods - in the same way that Threadless doesn’t seem to work that well beyond t-shirts - but I expect Etsy to be as successful as Threadless, which is to say do brilliantly, and will be one of the many-pieces-loosely-joined that revolutionize product distribution channels. I wish them very well.
I got to speak a lot with Matt Haughey who does such a brilliant solo job of running the vibrant massive community MetaFilter, I learn many things *every* conversation we have. (Unfortunately I had to miss his presentation to see Lane Becker and Thor Muller present on Satisfaction, a new 3rd-party style of customer support.) Matt falls into the very short list of people single-handedly building LARGE thriving communities and making them a sustainable (if not equally thriving) business. My list is Matt Haughey. Markus Frind, Drew Curtis, Heather Armstrong and Gabe Rivera. Who else would you add to that list?
Speaking of Satisfaction, I am 100% positive their business will be a success because they’re positioning themselves to be the community meeting space of the world’s customers and companies (that speak English currently). Even a subset of either of those parties could lead to many viable business models and the sincerity and excellence they are putting into the product guarantees they will make sure to do this superbly, leaving most company’s public customer support in the dust.
Our Dogster, Inc. adviser Scott Rafer, gave a great presentation on how to find create more value for your web service by trying to extract internet usage data that is new and meaningful. Scott’s ace in the hole these days is his understanding that when tracking user behavior (especially as it moves to the edge of your service’s realm) it is critical to do so in a non-personally identifiable manner and to give them the ability to not only opt-out but to expunge their previous history. He did say that most users really don’t care so even if you opt out system is sending in an email and deleting it manually, it will hardly be time consuming and they will feel much better knowing you always put their privacy first.
I also caught up with Sam Wick, head of Business Development at Userplane, which has become a very large and sophisticated ad network on top of their Flash-based Chat and IM offerings. I first met Sam in early 2004 through Stowe Boyd and was very happy to see him mover over to Userplane after the AOL acquisition. Sam is one of the rare business-focused smart cookies. There are droves of smart developers, and I meet a lot of entrepreneurs and CEO’s, but few spend 100% of their time enhancing revenue for the company. Sam does, and we had a lot to talk about. I’ve got to get him and my partner Steven together.
I met Rashmi Singh, co-founder of SlideShare (web-based software to show powerpoint slides, complete with audio overlays) who is another smartypants. In fact I learned she has a PhD in Psychology, a true secret weapon for a web app developer. We spoke a lot about non-traditional marketing of your services and growing a sustainable technology business.
Jet lag really messed rung my clock so I missed some early panels. One I wanted to see was Paul Graham founder Y Combinator incubator. They’re was a loved-it, hated-it response by the people I spoke to that were there. He posted an essay version of his talk.
Tom Coates presented on FireEagle (to be renamed) an internally built as-yet-unreleased Yahoo service that “knows” where a person (or user) currently is and previously was by reading in data from a dozen location-aware sources (such as flickr, upcoming, dopplr, manual input, phones with GPS) that info available to anyone. This is a service, not a business, and a smart move by Yahoo. Yahoop can afford to be the open network and gain most from letting everyone use it. I think they need some women and privacy freaks on their dev team as controlling your privacy has to be sacrosanct and the current binary opt-in/opt-out system is not flexible enough for such sensitive data.
I have to stop here. There are about 25 other really meaningful conversations but it’s already 2 weeks past and I shall just press, ‘Publish.’
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