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.