(2010-10-31) Business Of Software Godin Mckenzie

page was renamed from z2010-10-31-Business Of SoftwareGodinMackenzie

The Business Of Software (Software Industry) conference took place in early October.

Seth Godin summarizes his talk.

Patrick McKenzie summarizes the talks by Seth and lots of other folks.

• I found the section on Dharmesh Shah's (Hub Spot) talk to have some very interesting ideas...

  • measuring churn
  • charging for up-front consulting on how to maximize value from your tool. So if you know customers and the company benefit hugely by increasing consumption of consulting services, why charge for them? Answer: perceived value increases consumption, and perceived value is driven by cost. When you give people 5 hours of free telephone support with an engineer, they — being successful businesspeople — find difficulty clearing 5 hours free in their schedule, fail to show up for the call, get distracted, etc. When you charge them $500 for the call, they damn well show up.

• Scott Farquhar of Atlassian: Still: it is amazing how effective turning money into an experience is at motivating people than awarding them the money directly, even though this is crazily irrational.

• Rob Walling: EMail is far superior to competing methods (e.g. Social Media) of repeatable contact with customers — such as Twitter, blogs, RSS feeds, or your favorite social network — because it allows “personalized broadcasts”, where you can scalably communicate with an arbitrarily high number of people while also making it feel like everyone is getting individualized attention. (Not nearly enough people use this to its maximum potential, particularly with SaaS. Free tip from me: note what search term sent them to your website, put a variation of it in the subject line of the email, watch your open rate go through the freaking roof.)

• Joel Spolsky: Stack Overflow (funded by Union Square Ventures) has a very different corporate Culture than FogCreek, which Joel describes as a software company founded with the goal of becoming an “IntentionalCommunity” whose mission in life was providing programmers a great place to work. It was explicitly analogized to a kibbutz, with collective ownership, the profit being redistributed among employees, and decisions specifically made to promote community (one which stuck with me was the huge importance placed on breaking bread together on a daily basis)... Joel would prefer to work at Fog Creek, but thinks he has an ethical responsibility to make Stack Overflow succeed first, because — irrespective of Fog Creek maximizing his personal enjoyment — Stack Overflow has the potential to contribute a large social good to the world at large, and he views this as ethically mandatory given the opportunity...A sidenote: since, pace Seth Godin, the cost of producing software is cratering and the competition is exploding, Joel is gradually coming to the belief that the value in a software company isn’t the code, it is the community.

Update: super-short summaries of all talks.