Microconf 2014

I was in Las Vegas the whole last week for 2 reasons - Microconf and vacation. My primary reason for travel was Microconf though, and I was able to learn a lot from other peoples' experiences and connect to a lot of people.

My thoughts about Microconf? It was worth the money (both for the conference and the extra money I spent gambling), and I would love to go again next year. I'm not even sure where to start... There were talks about peoples' general experiences as they started, to how they got to where they are at right now, and also talks about mental health for entrepreneurs. I definitely won't remember everything I learned at Microconf, and there were so many great talks that I will not mention a lot of things. Here are some points that I'm taking back from Microconf 2014.

One talk that inspired me was Sherry Walling's presentation about "Playing the Long Game: Making Entrepreneurship a Sustainable Life". This talk was different from all of the other talks - it wasn't about steps taken to success or tips or such. This was about how to survive starting your own company. Sherry wasn't the only one that mentioned mental health, but her talk kind of pulled me in. I've always wanted to attend one of the TED conferences - and this was like one of those - it makes you feel better. You could connect with what she was saying and learn how to better your life by her tips of how to live. Here are some things she talked about that I will eventually try:
- When stressed or not happy with daily life, go on a retreat. Don't take anything with you that could distract you. Get away from the screen that you look at every day. At whatever location you decide, start listing out things that have a negative impact on your life. List things that make you angry / stressed / unhappy. Think of ways to resolve these issues.
- Every day at the end of your day, think of what was the worst part of the day. Think of what was the best part of the day. Then think of what you look forward to tomorrow. (I could start doing this on my blog). For today, the low of my day was this morning. I woke up around at 8:30, but I couldn't get up! After about 8 hours of sleep, I was still tired and couldn't get up, which was frustrating! My high point of the day was the company catered lunch. It happens every Wednesday, but hey... it's the small things in life! What I look forward to tomorrow is it being one day closer to Hopdoddy Burger Bar!
- Set aside a certain amount of time for your personal needs. It doesn't matter how much of a packed schedule you have, try to set aside time for your personal needs, be it yoga, sports, games or whatever. I've already got time set aside for my interests, but at the moment - I think my balance is a little bit off - so I will be lessening this "personal time"
- Eat well, sleep well, exercise well. I think I'm doing decent on all three. I sleep about 8-10 hours a day. I exercise at least 2 or 3 times weekly, sometimes even more as I have 3 hockey games every 2 weeks. I could work a little bit harder on eating well. I generally eat well, but sometimes I splurge and go on an unhealthy eating streak.


I can't recall who talked about every single one of the following points, but these are some things I'm trying at the moment to speed up the development of myself and my career.
- One thousand words per day. This whole blog started as a challenge to myself to write one thousands words per day - and my blog will be filled mainly with what I do daily and startup stuff. Whatever happens, I will definitely write my one thousand words per day!
- X hour work day. Until Microconf, my mentality was "I've got 4 hours after eating dinner tonight. That should be plenty to finish *blah*", but I learned that this will get me nowhere. When there's a deadline, people tend to work faster and get a lot more done, which I have personally experienced. With the way I was thinking before, I was too lax on time, and I would end up spending more than 80% of the time I have on unnecessary sites like Facebook and tech sites. The time I actually spent was dispersed between these 4 or 5 hours, and I wasn't able to get a full concentration for probably more than 15 minutes.  I will start shifting from 4 or 5 hours of programming time to an hour to start. My mentality will be that with this only hour that I have, I have to get as much done. I will keep myself from any distractions and get a full hour of work. This way I will also be able to separate work and entertainment. I won't be mixing these two up and having the guilty feeling of "I'm on Facebook when I'm supposed to be making *blah*"

The following is a little bit more of things to remember when launching my product, but for my future reference I will list them here.
- Charge, charge, charge. Don't be afraid to take money for the work you do. Be it not functioning 100%, charge customers early!
- Don't look for perfection. Your first launch should embarrass you when you look back at it. Don't wait to have the perfect product to launch as that may delay release by months or even worse, years. I've got my own experience with this a bit when I build a web application for a friend starting a triathlon gear selling site (basically like Craigslist, but more secure), and I had spent so much time on every little detail that the launch kept on getting delayed. I came into the project throughout the middle, but there had already been multiple developers who had worked on it, who started, looked for perfection, didn't accomplish it, left it where it was, and quit helping. The web app ended up being launched roughly 2 or 3 years after all of the market validation was done, and one of the reasons was the seeking of the developers for perfection.
- Lure people in with your signup forms. I've worked on multiple projects helping people out where their mailing list signup page is just that. I had originally planned to just have that too until I heard some good tips at Microconf. How many people will actually join mailing lists when they land on your page? I've seen plenty of sites that look interesting or appealing, but I hardly ever list my email on there. What incentive do I have? Give them incentive! If you're selling a book, list that the first chapter is free if you sign up! Give them a discount or some kind of offer.
- When charging, charge more. This is different from before. It's not about just charging in general, but when you charge, charge more.  If you've got a product selling for $10 vs selling for $40, the people who will be buying your $10 will be the type of people looking for cheap stuff that works. Generally speaking, those people also tend to be the ones that are a little bit more constantly asking you for attention. Not only that, but by charging more, you gain some trust and security. As a buyer, when there is a product on sale - which would you think is more reliable?
- Along with charging is a pricing model. Don't have just one standard price for everyone! Package stuff up to sell even more. A lot of the profit you can make will be from bundling your product up and selling extra features. Some ideas along this could be selling support or free updates for free for a year or such.
- Learn from when people are unsubscribing from your service. One of the best ways I've learned at Microconf to do this is to just add a little field in the cancellation form asking why their unsubscribing. There are many reasons why someone is cancelling your subscription. If it's something you can fix, fix it. If it's something you can't fix (such as their business is going out of business so they don't need your product), move on!
- Get told no. This isn't just from Microconf as I originally heard this from Joshua Baer, but get told "no". Don't be afraid of being told "no" or being rejected. Whenever you try to sell something, don't be afraid of NOT being able to sell it. Learn why you were told "no", improve, and move on! (and keep trying with the same person if that's what it takes). At Microconf, this wasn't exactly what was stated - it was stated more as "what could go wrong?" What is the worst that could happen? In the long run, it's not going to matter. Learn from your mistakes and keep going!



In the end, Microconf was a blast. What I learned is priceless and my thanks go out to the ones who organized the conference and my coworker! Today's blog is what I've taken from Microconf, and I'm sure I've missed a lot of things which when I remember I will blog about. I already looking forward to go next year to see what else I can learn. I also can't wait to see where I am at one year later. On a side note I also won something at the conference. They gave out lifetime memberships to the Academy, Oculus Rift, iPad Air, and a stapler. The stapler was always given out just as a joke, and guess who ended up winning the stapler?! That's right. Me. My bag was full so unfortunately I had to give it to my coworker - hopefully he puts it to good use. Also, this years conference was hosted at the Tropicana; it was my first time being there, but it was a decent hotel.

Also since this post has taken 2 days, here are my high points and low points of the day (Thursday 4/24).

High point: Out drinking with my coworkers. One of our coworkers is quitting, so we had a little get together with him at a bar. I'd say I didn't talk to him a lot, but he was one of the 4 people left in our office from the pre-acquisition dates. Good luck to him I suppose.

Low point: I was on deploy duty for the day. At our work space, the deploy duty is in charge of merging in all of the branches needed for deploy and running specs to make sure everything is good to go. Unfortunately, today's deploy consisted of a long live branch that another team in a different location had been working on, and I was having problems getting one single test to pass. The cause was even worse. It was a problem with validation because whoever wrote the spec didn't instantiate the variables correctly and was failing. Le Sigh.

What I look forward to tomorrow: As I mentioned earlier, my coworker is leaving our company, so we're having an office outing at Hopdoddy Burger Bar. Tomorrow will most likely be one of the more unproductive days at work. Last time we went to Hopdoddy's, everyone ended up being sleepy/drowsy, and we hardly got any work done.

Why Entrepoorneur?

What the hell is "entrepoorneur"? Is it something I made up? I honestly don't recall exactly how I came up with this, but this was something I came up with when I thought of my background and how I currently am. I did read some other people mention "entrepoorneur" being a "failed" entrepreneur, but I picked this name for a different reason. I have not had the full experience of starting a company. I've been poor since I've grown up, and this has kept my from doing exactly what I like. I've finally found a medium - of wanting to do what I want and also not risking losing all of my money.

If you've read my previous post, and you didn't realize - I spent a year and a half majoring in Electrical Engineering at the University of Texas. These one and a half years was a total waste of time - I took classes, paid for classes, but failed basically everything. After switching to Computer Science, I was in school for I believe 3 years. Throughout the 5 years at the University of Texas, my parents couldn't support me, so I had taken student loans for everything for all 5 years. That means loans for tuition, loans for food, loans for rent, and anything else that could cost money attending college. I received roughly $20k/year for tuition and some years an extra $5k for the years I took summer classes. That means graduating college, I had roughly $100k of student loans. Now that's quite a bit of a loan graduating from college wanting to start a company, and that's basically how I came up with the term "entrepoorneur".

Now let's talk about this happy medium I've recently found. After participating in 3 Day Startup, I definitely wanted to start up a company. What kind of company did I have in mind? A game changer - an idea that would get millions of dollars of backing from huge VC firms; an idea that would affect everyones' life; a company that would get huge and get bought out by some other big company - or go public or something... What would I have to do for that? I would most likely have to quit my day job, and my idea would have to be my day job. That sounds like a great idea, except for the fact that I owe about $100k from my college years... How is this going to work? For the longest time, I had brainstormed what I could do. "Let's try bankruptcy" - err... that doesn't seem to get rid of my student loans.... "How about leaving the states and never coming back" - that's another bad idea as I have nowhere else I would rather be than Austin, Texas right now.... My student loans felt like chains holding me down from what I wanted to do. I had been offered CTO position by a friend who had been working on his idea, but I had to kindly decline because of these damned student loans. After failing to think of what I could do - I just gave up the idea briefly. I still had the urge deep down that I wanted to start my company, but I was just going to have to wait until I pay off all of my student loans first. This is where my coworker came in. He had started his own company, and he does it as a side business. He has his day job, but at night and in the mornings before work, he works on his side company. I don't think I had ever thought of creating a self funded startup. My mind was so set on creating a company backed by a VC, that I had forgotten the option of self funding a company. This way - I would get the best of both worlds. I would be able to pay off my student loans, as I work on creating a company on the side. As I talked to my coworker, I had a lot of questions and thoughts. How exactly would I "bootstrap" a company? How do I even start? Where do I start? Luckily enough, my coworker agreed on mentoring me in exchange for me helping develop and sell one of his ideas.

That's basically how I ended up where I'm at now and how I came up with the name entrepoorneur for my blog. Hopefully that changes one day, but for now, this is me.

The Start!

My life has completely diverged from where I saw myself 10 years ago. 10 years ago, I was in high school hoping to be working at some big corporation, doing the same thing daily and making money - the secure life. The life without risk. First step to accomplishing this goal was to go to college - I got into the University of Texas Electrical Engineering program, and it had to have been the worst couple years of my life. The electrical engineering program at the University of Texas is pretty well known, and it was definitely a path that could lead to a comfortable life - there are plenty of oil industry companies hiring for engineers from UT, but it wasn't what I was seeking. Every class seemed like a drag - at least the ones that I went to, and there was nothing about electrical engineering I liked. I've had interest in games and electronics, so I believed electrical engineering was definitely what I wanted to pursue. After getting my first semester grade reports back, it correlated pretty well with my interests - it was as low as you could imagine. After staying in electrical engineering for another full year (being completely clueless), I finally changed my major to Computer Science - which was more of what I wanted to do - programming / making things / solving problems and puzzles. That was the first step I took off of the path I was "planning" to take. Most days after I switched to Computer Science was fun - even though it was a repetition of class / games / eat / study, I was doing what I liked doing - learning new languages and solving programming questions. Sounds extremely nerdy, but I enjoyed the feeling of accomplishment after I solved each problem.

After about 2 years into Computer Science, a friend of mine who was an organizer for 3 Day Startup had suggested I participate in the program. With some hesitations at the beginning after being informed of what it is, I applied, interviewed, and got accepted. The idea of 3 Day Startup is to put it simply - "Start up a tech company in a weekend by doing market validations, creating demos, pitching the shit out of your idea, and more. Learn by doing". During 3 Day Startup, I was able to experience something I hadn't yet in college. My parents had always said the "University of Texas is oh so great". Being in Austin for almost 4 years, I just wanted to grab my bags and head back to Katy, Texas where I'm originally from. The high school I went to had some intelligent, fun people, but at the University of Texas, I didn't seem to find the same type of people. It may have to due to the lack of socializing I had done (or possibly my major - but no way - computer science majors are the most social....). The "crew" of 3 Day Startup was completely different than what I had seen so far going to UT. They were smart - many people who had improved their expertise through their own time and interests. Not necessarily 40 students with all having a 4.0 GPA, but people who had the experience and the skills - specializing in many different things. People with skill that go beyond just numbers representing how well students do in class. I met programmers who had already had apps available on stores, designers who had taken part in fashion shows, MBA students who had worked at a big trading firm, and many other kinds of students. Every single person was good at something they valued - each also with their own distinct personalities. With all of their expertise, every single individual was self motivated. Self motivated to learn, improve, and to also start their own company. What was I doing there? I'm a drop out engineering student, who applied to computer science because of the interest of games and problem solving. I had just applied to 3 Day Startup because some friend just suggested I apply... Seeing and being around all of these people, I felt uncomfortable to say the least - I felt unqualified and out of place. After coming to Austin, this was the only non school related program I had really taken part in and had never taken step outside of my little bubble I created. This feeling started to change though as the weekend went through. Working in a group of about 6 or 7 people, of which about 2 or 3 were developers, I soon started to realize that everyone is still learning. After seeing these other developers make things / talk about things, I was clueless. I was on Google looking things up like "what the fuck is an MVP", "Ruby on Rails? What?", "SaaS!?" As the weekend went along, a lot of questions I had were also asked by these other "oh so perfect" developers that I had built them to be in my head. They've got their expertise, but there are still things a lot of these people don't know. The only difference between those other students and me was that they acknowledged when they didn't know something. I was used to being "decent" - knowing stuff at least other people knew - so there weren't many times growing up where I had asked "What does BLAH mean". I wasn't used to asking questions. I remember seeing people ask STUPID questions when in high school and in my head, I would think "oh god here we go again - this guy... sigh", but that was the incorrect way of thinking. I've heard of professors saying "There's no stupid questions". I partially agreed with this - but always thought that "you ask questions - BECAUSE you are stupid". Now here I was afraid of asking questions, Googling everything because of the way I had always handled situations like this. This mentality definitely has changed since then, and I have 3 Day Startup to thank for that. Through the weekend, I realized a couple more key factors that differed between the other students and me. Another difference was the utilization of their free time. Watching other developers actually make prototypes for their companies throughout the weekend, I realized programming wasn't their "occupation", it was also their hobby. They spent their free time actually programming, reading, and other activities that would improve their skills. The final thing I noticed was how social everyone was. Most of the people here were not afraid of stepping out of their bubbles - they are comfortable talking to strangers, getting to know them. I was never really the type to "be myself" when meeting new people. I never really talk to someone until I get to know them. But here were roughly 40 other students who had meet other for the first time socializing with each other and working together right after they had met each other.

Overall, the 3 Day Startup weekend went well. I was able to learn a lot from just the short weekend. Not just learning how to start up a company, but also knowledge of how to better live my life. I was able to meet many people who I still talk and work together with. But most important, I had finally decided what I wanted to do with my life; starting my own company. This blog will mainly be about everything I am doing to start my own company. Just beware - I suck at writing. When I informed my girlfriend of my "one thousand words per day" challenge, the first thing she said was "but you suck at writing". Hopefully through this I will learn how to write... Even knowing I suck at writing, I am going to publish everything I write. Embarrassed as I am, I've decided to step out of my comfort zone! This whole one thousand words per day challenge was something I learned about at Microconf, which I just got back from. Microconf was one hell of a conference. I enjoyed every talk given, and I enjoyed talking to the many entrepreneurs present at the conference. I will go into more detail of this probably in the next few posts about everything I had learned there.