Today I’m at the Gather 2015 conference. This was originally “Barcamp Auckland” before they got their own brand and went off to do random stuff. This is about my 5th year or so here (I missed one or two).
Website is gathergather.co.nz . They do random stuff as well as the conference.
Welcome
- Welcome and intro to conference history from Ludwig
- Rochelle thanks the sponsors
- Where to go for dinner, no smoking, watch out for non-lanyard people., fire alarms, etc
- Quiet room etc
Lessions learnt from growing a small team from 5-15
- Around 30 people. Run by Ben, works at sitehost, previously worked at Pitch
- Really hard work. Takes a lot of time and real effort to build a great team
- Need dedicate time and resources to growing team, Need someone who is focussed on growing the team and keeping the current team working
- Cringe when people say “HR” but you need some in the sort of role and early on.
- At around 16 people and doesn’t have full HR person yet. Before FT have someone with scheduled time to focus on team or company culture. In ideal world that person might not be in a manager role but be a bit senior (so they hear what the lower level employees say.
- Variety and inclusion are keep to happy team
- Once you are at 10+ members team will be diverse so “one size fits all” won’t work anymore. Need to vary team activities, need to vary rewards. Even have team lunches at different places.
- Hire for culture and fit
- From the first person
- Easier to teach someone skills than to be a good team member
- Anecdote: Hired somebody who didn’t fit culture, was abrasive, good worker but lost productivity from others.
- Give people a short term trial to see if they fit in.
- You will need to change the way communicate as a team as it grows
- A passing comment is not enough to keep everybody in the loop
- Nobody wants to feel alienated
- Maybe chat software, noticeboard, shared calendar.
- Balance the team work the members do
- Everybody needs to enjoy the work.
- Give people interesting rewarding work, new tech, customer interaction
- Share the no-fun stuff too. Even roster if you have to. Even if somebody volunteers don’t make them always do it.
- Appreciate you team members
- Praise them if they have put a lot of work into something
- Praise them before you point out the problems
- Listen to ideas no matter who they come from.
- 5 Questions/Minutes rule
- If someone is working not well, wonder if problem is elsewhere in their life. Maybe talk to them. Job of everyone in the team
- Appreciate your teams work, reward them for it
- Do what feels right for your team. What works for some teams might not work for all. No “one size fits all”
- Building great teams isn’t science it is an art. Experiment a bit.
- Taking the time to listen to 10 people instead of just 5 takes longer. Maybe this can be naturally taken on by others in the team, no just the “boss”.
- Have a buddy for each new hire. But make sure the buddys don’t get overloaded my constantly doing this with each new hire.
- Going from 10 to 100 ppl. They same thing doesn’t work at each company size.
- The point where you can get everybody in a room till when you can’t. At that point you have multiple teams and tribalism.
- If you have a project across multiple teams then try and put everybody in that project together in a room.
- Have people go to each others standups
- Hire people who can handle change
- Problem if you you buy a small company, they small company may want to keep their culture.
- Company that does welcome dinners not farewell dinners
- Make sure people can get working when they arrive, have an email address etc, find out if they have preferences like nice keyboard.
- Don’t hire when you are extremely busy that you can’t properly get them onboard (or you may pick the wrong person). Never hire impulsively. Hire ahead of time.
- Don’t expect them to be fully productive straight away. Give them something small to start on, no too complicated, no to crazy dependant on your internal crazy systems. But make sure it is within their skill level in case they struggle.
- Maybe summer student projects. Find good people without being stuck with someone. Give them a project that isn’t high enough priority for the FT people.
- Create training material
Writing for fun and profit
- Run by Peter Ravlich
- Scrivener – IDE for writing
- Writing full time (with support from partner), currently doing 4 projects simitaniously
- Less community for Fantasy Writers than for literary writers. Bias in NZ against Genre fiction
- Community – SpecficNZ – For speculative fiction. SciFi con each year and have a stand at Armageddon each year. $30 per year
- If you write roleplaying games look at selling via rpgnow.com
- Remember if publishing with Amazon then remember to be non-exclusive
- For feature writing you need to know editors who like you and like your work.
- “Just keep writing” , only way you’ll ever get better
- Writing a weekly column:
- The Best way: Write articles week ahead of time, edited by his wife, sent to the editor well in advance.
- Leaving to last minute, not pre-editing quality varies, speakers column got dropped
- Find the type of writing that you like and are good at.
- Run everything past a reading group. “Am I on the right track?”
- Treated writing as a jobs. Scheduled “Write for an hour, edit for 30 minutes, lunch, then repeat”. Make yourself.
- Lots of sites that that push you to write a set number of words. Give you badges, pictures of kittens or punishment to keep you to a wordcount
- Join a online writing group and post regular updates and get a bit of feedback
- Daily Routines Blog or spinoff book for some ideas
- Developmental editor or Structural editor
- Developmental editor – Go to early, guidelines of what you should be doing, what direction you should be going. What is missing. Focused at plot level.
- Structural Editor – Goes though line-by-line
- Need to find editor who suits your style of writing, knows genre is important. Looks for those who have edited books/authors in your area.
- Self editing – set aside novel, change font, new device, read though again. Change context so looking at it with new eyes.
- Get contract with editor reviewed by Lawyer with experience in the industry (and on your side)
- Most traditional publishers expect to see an edited novel
- Talk to agents, query those who work with authors in similar areas to you.
- Society of Authors
- Have some legal experts, give you a reference
- Kindle K-boards, a bit romance orientated but very good for technical stuff.
- Go to poetry or reading/writing group. Get stuff out to other people. Once you have got it out to some, even just a small group then small jump to send it out to billions.
- Have a stretegy on how to handle reviews, probably don’t engage with them.
- Anne Friedman – Disapproval Matrix
- You are your own toughest reviewer
- Often people who went to journalism school, although not many actual journalists
- Starling Literary Journal
- Lists of Competitions and festivals in various places
- Hackathon ( Step it up 2015 ) coming up, one group they want is for journalists who want to get more money into the job
The World of Vexillology – Flag Design
- Dan Newman
- flagdesign.nz + flagtest.nz
- NZ Flag design cutoff this coming Thursday (the 16th of July)
- People interesting in how the flag design originates, eg how Navel custom influences designs
- 6000 odd submissions -> 60 shortlist -> 4 voted in referendum -> 1 vs current
- 60 people at meeting in Wellington, less in other places.
- Government Website
- first time a country changed a flag by referendium not at the time of signifcant event (eg independence)
- A lot of politicians are openly republican, but less push and thought in rest of population
- Concern that silver flag looks like corporate logo
- Easier to pretend you are an Australian and ask them “What would the NZ flag look like?” . Eg “Green Kangaroo on yellow” , “While silver fern or Kiwi on Black background”
- Also lots of other countries use the Southern Cross
- most countries the National team colors are close to that of the flag
- Feeling if even flag changes now, then after “full independence” will change again
- What will happen if Celebs come out if favour of a specific design
- Different colours have different associations ( in different places )
- All sorts of reasons why different colours are on a flag
- The Silver fan looks like a fish to some
- Needs to look good scaled down to emoji size
Bootstrapping your way to freedom
- From Mark Zeman – Speedcurve
- Previous gather sessions have been orientated toward VC and similar funding
- There is an alternative where you self-fund
- Design teacher – all students wanted to work on LOTR cause it was where all the publicity was.
- Boostrapping – Doing it your way, self funded, self sustaining, usually smaller
- Might take Capital later down the track
- 3Bs seen as derogatory
- Lots of podcasts, conferences and books etc
- See Jason Cohen, many bits in present taken from him
- The “ideal” bootstrapped business. Look at it from your own constraints
- Low money, low time, self funded, try to create a cash machine
- SAAS business lower end is very low. Very small amount per year
- Low time if working on the side
- Trying to get to maybe $10k/month to go fulltime
- Reoccurring revenue. 150 customers at $66/month. Not many customers, not huge value product but has to be a reasonable amount.
- Maybe not one-off product
- Enterprise vs consumer space
- Hard to get there with $0.99 one-offs in App store
- Annual plans create cashflow
- Option Boutique product. Be honest about who you are, how big you really are, don’t pretend to be a big company
- B2B is a good space to be in. You can call 150 business and engage with them.
- Not critical, Not real time (unless you want to be up at 3am)
- Pick something that has “naturally reoccurring pain”. eg “Not a wedding planner” , probably multiple times per month
- Aftermarkets. eg “Plugins for wordpress. Something small, put 20 hours into it, put it up for $5”. See also Xero, Salesforce.
- Pick Big Markets, lots of potential customers
- “Few NZ clients great for GST since I just get refunds”
- Better By design. Existing apps mean there is already a market. Took an existing Open source product (webpagetest.org) and put a nice wrapper on it
- Number of companies have published their numbers. Look at the early days of them while it took them to get to $10k/month (eg many took a year or two to get there).
- Option to do consultancy on the side if you go “full time”. Cover the gap between you new business and your old wage. Had a 1 year contract that let him go half time on new biz but cover old expenses.
- Don’t have false expectations on how quickly it will happen
- Hard when it was a second job. Good because it was different from the day-job, but a lot of work.
- Prototype and then validate. In most cases you should go the other way around.
- If you want to talk to someone have something to offer. Have a pay it forward.
- Big enterprises have people too. Connect to one guy inside and they can buy your product out of his monthly credit card bill.
- Not everybody is doing all the cool techniques. Even if you are a “B” then you are ahead of a lot of the “C”s . eg creating sites with responsive design.
- 1/3 each – Building Business, Building Audience, Building Product
- Loves doing his GST etc
- In his case he did did each in turn. Product , then Audience then Business
- Have a goal. Do you want to be a CEO? Or just a little company?
- His Success measures – Fun, time with kids, travel, money, flexability, learning, holidays, adventures, ideas, sharing
- Resources: Startups for the Rest of us. A Smart Bear Blog, Amy Hoy – Unicorn Free, GrowthHacker TV, Microconf Videos
