Personally I'd suggest you guys wait until they post the video and I transcriptify it, since the talk is better than the slide deck, but if you absolutely HAVE to read something this morning then skip to the section marked "Quick Wins for SaaS businesses" and look for the five bits of advice with big ugly yellow stars next to them.
If you have questions, I'd be happy to... board a 12 hour flight back to Japan in approximately 5 minutes. Feel free to ask me over email some other day.
Have a good flight back home, Patrick. It has been a pleasure to meet you in real life.
Thanks for all the information you shared and for entertaining us at the buffet. Those stories were gold :-)
Jason Cohen, Erica, and Rob Walling all delivered probably in the top 5 of talks I've ever seen for SaaS founders. The notes can't do them justice but they ROFLstomp the utility of anything you'll read on the Internet this week. (Obviously, mad props to the attendee who took it upon himself to take notes for you all.)
Hey Erica. Thanks for sharing the link and for the incredible talk you delivered. I learned a lot from your talk and from listening in on you guys talking at the buffet.
Wish you all the best with your rebranding efforts from WooshTrafic to Marketvibe!
Yes, LessFilms recorded all the talks. No idea what the turnaround time will be. IIRC, last year it took 6+ months to get online.
MicroConf was AMAZING. If you haven't seen Patrick speak, you really need to. And you still have a chance to this month in Philadelphia: http://baconbiz.com
I think, that it is a marketing thing as well. You just don't want to put out the videos shortly after the conference, because of all the people who paid $700+ to attend.
They might feel betrayed and appreciate having a bit of a head start.
Agreed - I am actually building my own CMS which I really really need to use to launch my blog Real Soon Now.
So its OSS, which may or may not be a good idea, but this does beg the question - how much of my needs are likely to replicate into the communities needs or is it just worthwhile for everyone sticking with their own me-ware for now?
I like patio11's approach and agree we should write our own business systems to meet our particular need - I am finishing off a CMS that I have also opensourced (it's text and templates and cookies for tracking, about 100 lines)
Now I am not promoting that codebase, only releasing it cos I don't want to waste a GitHub private repo. But I do wonder if we should all write our own CMS / mailchimp / an tester or if we should community build them or just roll up packages
Partly I am asking what are the common functions we should all have a custom builds and partly where do we draw the line on build vs "buy"
What I need and what is almost impossible to find is a good Autoresponder email system with a template editor, a few stats and basic list management/segmentation.
The catch: I must be allowed to self-host. This is almost impossible to find since everybody seems to rely on 3rd party email services.
Oy. Do NOT self-host an email autoresponder. I wrote a great comment about this a few years ago on Brian Armstrong's blog--and he's now doing Coinbase after deciding the email stuff wasn't worth it.
Look in my profile to see who I am and why I'd say this, but as a quick summary, I have years of experience and have also helped companies set up autoresponders that do over 1M emails a day, and that's exactly why I say this. It is a clusterf*ck and a rabbit hole a mile deep and a mile wide. Pay the money (or in Mailchimp's case, don't pay any money until you get bigger.) It is worth EVERY penny.
By the way, any good autoresponder (I use Mailchimp and Aweber and like them both for different purposes) will let you easily export/back up contacts, and none of the big companies are going anywhere.
Ah, finally found it! http://brianarmstrong.org/blog/my-next-project/ Ctrl-F 'Erica' and read the whole thread of him/me! :) (He did launch the biz, but shut it down not long after that. Coinbase is doing much better! ;)
Do you want to become an expert in email deliverability, DNS, bounces, white listing, DKIM, SPF?
Or do you want to sell your product?
It boils down to that. Spend your time doing what you are GREAT at and what you WANT to do. Are you great at email deliverability? Do you want to spend your time becoming an expert on that? Probably not.
I know how to change the oil in my car. I know how to mow my lawn. I know how to clean toilets. I don't do any of those things because they are a huge waste of my time that is better spent elsewhere. Same thing goes here.
Thats what I am saying - why must you self-host, and is that need so great and shared by enough that you will write your own (a few hours with the python email library, or weeks of work, whichever it is)
If you have questions, I'd be happy to... board a 12 hour flight back to Japan in approximately 5 minutes. Feel free to ask me over email some other day.