Post-Game SXSW2007
This is my second SXSW which apparently makes me a veteran because I get quoted saying things like this: 
It’s true. The best part of SXSW is the networking which goes on outside of the panels. SXSW is a concentrated pool of people who share your same interests which means if you randomly choose to talk to that guy in the bar, he probably does something you care about. While I’m sure this year’s SXSW will break the previous years attendance record, the fact you’re surrounded by peers keeps the conference feeling small.
There’s a lot of bar chat that the panels this year are lower quality than previous years, but I haven’t been to enough panels to give you an educated opinion. What I do know is that there is a lack of themes wandering the halls. There is a lack of buzz. Last year, there was lots of “How to Get Bought by Google” and “How To Be Like 37Signals” discussion, but the hallway discussion this year is random and unfocused. It’s not clear to me what we collectively care about this year.
I’d like to thank my panelists, John Gruber, Shaun Inman, and Nick Bradbury for participating in my Design Aesthetic of the Indie Developer. They made my job simply by showing up and talking about the jobs and their products.
I’d also like to thank Kevin Newsum over at 20x2 for the opportunity to answer the question “What If?” in two minutes in front of a room full of strangers. I upgraded the question to “What if you had two minutes to live and could only send text messages?” and finding the answer to that is a journey I would recommend taking infrequently.
As with last year, the drinking was epic, the stories are endless, and none of it would’ve happened without Khoi, Liz, Gruber, Nick, Shaun, Rob, Alyssa, James, Chris, That Facebook Guy, Amy, Joe, Rossana, Duncan, and endless bright people I’m forgetting because I was pretty drunk, but having fun. Let’s not wait another 365, ok?
SXSW 2007
I’m searching my articles from last year regarding SXSW and I can’t find any documentation of one of the major discoveries. SXSW is the only conference I know where designers and developers hang out. Designers have design conferences. Developers have nerd conferences. SXSW has somehow convinced both parties to head to Austin and actually talk to each other.
Designers and developers have a basic conflict of interest. They both believe that they are the only parties on the organizational chart who build real stuff. Actually, everyone on the organizational chart believes that, but the designers and the developers are the only ones who actually do build real things. SORRY SALES.
SXSW is neutral ground. Designers and developers huddled up in hotel bars drunk and yelling at each other because we know that we desperately need each other.
Brilliant.
Thanks to whomever voted for my panel, I’m happy to report that I’m moderating again this year. As with last year, I’m lucky to have an all-star set of panelists, including:
Nick Bradbury, Creator of FeedDemon, TopStyle, and HomeSite. Nick is going to handle the Windows side of the debate.
John Gruber, The original Daring Fireball. John will argue with anyone about anything. Can’t wait.
Shaun Inman, The man behind Mint. Handling the web application side of the debate, Shaun will also explain his fascination with green.
The title of this year’s panel is The Design Aesthetic of the Indie Developer which I’m certain is a lock for most misspelled panel of all time. What are we going to talk about? WE’RE GOING TO TALK DESIGN PEOPLE. We’re going to talk about design when it’s just you and your thoughts. We’re going to talk about how constraints make you creative and then we’re going to answer some questions and then we’re drinking until someone has to get on a plane.
The panel is on Tuesday, March 13th some time in the AM. Before that, I’ll be part of the 20x2 event on Monday @ 7pm at The Parish where I’ll have the opportunity to answer the question “What If?” in two minutes or less.
Oddly, I’m much more concerned about “What If?” than the panel. Actually, concerned isn’t the word. Unprepared is closer. Little of both really.
In unrelated news, I’ve giving Twitter and Twitterific a two-week trial. Please play along as I think this self-imposed trial will be more interesting with more eyeballs.
SXSW: Best of Show
Top 3 Themes Discussed at Bars:
- It only takes a few people to create a legitimate business. Craigslist is 19 people. 37Signals is somewhere around 5… maybe 6? These are the name brand companies who are leading the charge… so what the hell is SixApart doing with 100+ folks and 23 million?
- Should I take VC money or not? It depends what you’re building, but software is free and hardware has dropped like a rock, so unless your idea is infrastructure intensive, fund it yourself.
- Fucking Charge For It. Relayed at the Fried/Coudal keynote. There is lots of hand-wringing regarding pricing models for web services. Fried’s point was, charge for it. If no one pays, you’re charging too much or your product blows. Yes, you’ll see less traffic when money gets in the way, but YOU NEED MONEY and PEOPLE WILL PAY FOR VALUE.
Best Holy Shit:
In aviation, the Big Sky Theory is that two randomly flying bodies will likely never collide because there’s a huge amount of sky up there. Remember all those World War II movies where the planes are flying through what appears a sea of explosions? How do they survive? They hide in the plentiful amount of sky.
The Rands Big People Theory is a variant of this idea and it applies to gathering audiences for Your Great Idea. You may be wondering whether or not there is an audience for whatever that idea is… and, if there an audience, how big it’ll be. Like there is a huge amount of sky over your head, there is an equal amount of people on the planet and, I swear, your brain can not conceive of the size of this number. In fact, my guess is your brain is tricking you into thinking something silly like, “Well, I’ve been to New York and, boy, that’s a lot of people… so the planet probably has more than that… but it still feels New Yorkish, right?”
No. There’s more. I can give you a pretty precise number, but your brain is going to try make sense of that number and it can’t. Here’s a better way. One of the SXSW panels was about making money via web comics and one of the featured panelists did a successful comic about, wait for it, libraries. The author talked about how librarians loved him and how he spoke at library conferences.
If you mailed me and wrote, “Rands, I’ve got a great idea for a web comic. I really want to tackle that whole emerging library meme”, I would giggle, wish you much luck, and giggle some more. Yet, here’s this fellow at SXSW explaining how he’s making cash money on this library web comic.
If some dude can scribe a library web comic and touch a significant population there is no way that your kooky idea can’t find an audience.
Best Panel:
It actually wasn’t a panel, it was a presentation by Daniel Gilbert entitled “How to do precisely the right thing at all possible times.” His pitch was how the human brain is prone to errors in estimating odds and estimate value when making decisions. Wonderful, fact filled presentation.
Best Conference Quirk:
SXSW is the first conference I’ve been to where panelists and presenters swear. Fuckin’ A.
Best Keynote:
Craig Newmark. Not only valuable insight into the workings of Craigslist, but also an entertaining interview. Craig’s title is Customer Service Rep which he chose because Craigslist is a site generated by his customers. His philosophy is to get out of the way and let people do their thing. Humble guy and inspirational content.
Best Bar Crawl:
The key to any conference where you are going to network with random folks is to finish the last night of the conference drunk and closing the bar. Extra credit for finding a bright group of folks where it’s terribly difficult to get a word in edgewise. Tip of the hat to the Hilton Bar Closing Club:
Special Thanks:
Lastly, I’d like to thank the panelists who joined me for the Sink or Swim panel. These four gentlemen came from vastly different parts of the country to sit down and explain the important decisions they’ve made in building their businesses. I’m incredibly thankful for their participation.
See you all next year.
SXSW: The Experiment
The panel: “Does your blog have a business?”
The panelists:
- DL Byron, Texturedesign (Moderator)
- Phoebe Espiritu, SimplifierLab
- Eric Rice, Audioblog
- Shaun Inman, Haveamint
- Jeffrey Zeldman, Happy Cog
Monday, 10am panel here which means you can still smell booze in the air. Panelists are sober. The panelists are a collection of marquee bloggers who are actually making money via the web. I liveblogged this and these are my edited notes. I’m not expecting this to read well, but there are some gems below.
Pre-game. Byron has an introduction lamb story. We all sing happy birthday to Eric Rice. Not your average conference.
Byron is writing a book about business blogging. How do your turn your blog into a business?
Zeldman. 1995. Started personal site. Pretended to know what the web was about. Writing about how to do web site design. Building a community.
In his prior job, generating the income, but not making decisions. Had no money, had my own company. Started A List Apart. Worked in ads, didn’t believe in ads. Bring one product you believe in. (Rands wonders: First mover advantage in play here?)
Other business forming. An Event Apart. A Book Apart. Coming soon.
Inman. CSS Zen Garden. Blog started getting hits, so wanted to watch visitors. Gave away ShortStat. Turned into Mint. Polled user to find out if they’d use it.
Decided early on to make it extendable. Community decided this.
Byron. Was a UPS man. Had a personal journal forever. Talking about what you are doing. New markets come to you when you just talk. Formed Clip’n’Seal. This is a, not kidding, product which seals plastic bags (patent pending). In use by NASA. This is scary on many levels.
Eric Rice. Accidental entrepreneurship. Multimedia nerd. Cheese sandwich blogger? Started show 4 years ago. Nothing can stop me because the tools are there. Doing the Hollywood thing? Pop-culture slash tech thing. Ego. Disagree with all the rules. Form an original thought. Teaching the process. “Eating your old dog food”
Phoebe: 4’10”. Situational (situated?) software. When people realize there is a problem… learn to scratch your own itch. Natural to extend your testing to your community. Awhile ago, you need focus group to gather this data. Blogs allow you to build communities. (Rands says: This is the point of the panel: Blogs build communities which care about your content)
Zeldman. Didn’t want celebrity. I was into the whole “I can express myself”. Even if only 5 people come, who cares? Not motivated to make money. A great way to meet people. Contrarianess. “Pick someone you want to kill”. “I think I have more to say than that guy.”
Inman: ShortStat started as personal project. Comes back 10-fold. Whatever your readership is… Intelligent and willing to challenge your ideas. Blog buzz. Went free lance — had to turn down client work. Blog that determine what the product will be. EgoApps
Byron: How do you arrive on pricing?
Inman: Recoup costs. Figuring out what it’s value is… Backlash of charging for Mint created more buzz. Exceeded revenue expectation in a week.
Rice: Has a business model. #1 love = criticism. Sometimes you are alone, it’s your faith which is driving you. There is no plan.
Phoebe: State of flow — passionate users. Nerd DNA = Naturally, you want to fix something that appears broken. “How do you need to make money?”
Question: The traffic question. Did the audience find you? How did you create a community?
Zeldman: Keep putting content out there. TechCrunch. Where’d the hell did this come from? How’d it be come relevant?
Rice: Writing How-To content is a win/win. Folks love to learn and, if it supports, you’re site, you’re creating customers.
(Rands says, Executing on the idea is what matters.)
SXSW: Half Time
Halfway through any trip, it’s time to go home. Vegas, Europe, or SXSW… after two solid days of different, I’m ready to get the hell out.
This is not a rational state of mind, it’s a subconscious self preservation mental switch that you brain flips after 48 hours of totally new content. Your brain is tired of processing people, places, and things so it says, “You. Home. Less processing.”
Panel is over. Went famously. SXSW has a Green Room where each panel is given a table for pre-game before the event. It was at this table that the panelists, myself, Joel Spolsky, Ev Williams, Cabel Sasser, and Joshua Schachter sat together for the first time.
I had ten minute intro presentation that I’d be fretting over for the past few weeks, but after ten minutes at the Green Room table, I knew the thing the audience was going to remember were the panelists. Not the intro. Whew.
Topics covered, off the top of my head, and not complete:
- Why three out of the four gentlemen turned Google acquisition offers down
- How to hire engineers
- Types of engineering perks that work
- Weblogs and their relation to shipping products
- Why take VC money? (Ev, Joshua = Yes. Cabel, Joel = No)
There’s more, I’m sure, but it’s a blur. Too much processing.
[Update]: And, yes, I am having fun. It’s a mentally high-bandwidth situation when you’re sitting at table full of Type-A engineers and creative types. This has drained me.
The noteworthy population at SXSW are bright folks who are coming out of visual design, web design, or other creative professions and are considering a move into software development.
Interesting.
First, no, you don’t have to go college to be a programmer. Second, no, if you’ve never ever programmed, you’re not going to be able to pick-up Ruby on Rails without a serious investment… I know it’s Whizzing up the Bang in terms of approachability, but you’re still going to need to make some leaps if you want to start coding.
Three college classes that were essential for me to start programming: 1 C programming class, a data structures class, and, oooh, I don’t know… A hardware architecture class… I still think it matters to know how the plumbing works.
The noteworthy meme is “Should I or should I not take VC cash?” Spolsky did a fine job explaining why you should not take money and I’ll will butcher his explanation thusly, “VCs have a different agenda than you”. Translation: “Don’t take money from people who don’t want to do the same thing as you.”
Both Panic and Fogcreek are self-funded affairs. The question is, “Before you had a product, how did you eat?” Jason Fried’s fine keynote explained, “Do your start-up on the side”, but I’d have difficulty with that since I’m the type that fully needs to soak in what I’m building. Multi-tasking between my Real Job and the Next Great Thing would mean I’d be doing two things poorly rather than one thing well.
Also: The Social Customer Manifesto was paying attention.
And this fellow, too.
And Rocketboom leads with two clips from the panel…
SXSW: Prelude
The Internet killed the last major conference I attended. Each November, eager young nerds would travel to Vegas for Comdex to hear the latest and greatest from the then-bigger hitters. My personal embarassing high point was watching Bill Gates demonstrate the WYSIWYG version of Microsoft Word that, wait for it, did columns.
THEY GET IT! THEY FINALLY GET IT! USABLE WELL DESIGNED SOFTWARE.
I was young.
Comdex did not die because we lacked cool in NerdTech. It died because it was a software show and, with the advent of the Internet, bits have become extremely easy to ship hither and fro. Why wait until November when there is an established distribution medium to get your bits in front of everyone?
The Comdex folks tried until 2003 to hold it together, but, in the end, many of the major participants just went to the somewhat-more-Internet-proof Consumer Electronics Show. This is why you see Larry Page, a software guy, awkwardly nerding his way through the CES keynote… it’s the only major NerdTech show around.
This morning I’m traveling to South by SouthWest which, as revealed by eighteen seconds of Wikipedia research, is a music festival. There are eight thousand folks who are headed to Austin, Texas to whoop it up at one of the biggest music festivals in the United States.
And me. The nerd.
Like CES sucked in the software folks, SXSW has sucked in both the movie folks and the nerds except they call it Interactive and Film. For each music attendee at SXSW, there are .375 Interactive and Film attendees which means there’s a good chance there will be a mosh pit at my panel.
Rands In Repose will go through a brief transformation over the next five days in that it might actually resemble a weblog.
The working plan…
Friday
11:00a: Flight from San Jose to Austin — Arrive @ 5p
6:00p: Car Rental + Hotel Shennanigans, Dinner w/ Friends
10:00p: Local Bar Recon w/ DF
Saturday
9:00a: Sign-in, Coffee Acquisition
10:00a: Traditional Design and New Technology
11:00a: Daniel Gilbert Presentation: How To Do Precisely the Right Thing at All Possible Times
2:00p: Jim Coudal / Jason Fried Opening Remarks
3:30p: How to Increase Creativity at Work
4:00p: Panel pre-game @ Austin Hotel Lobby Bar
6:00p: Dinner w/ the Divorcee
10:00p: RANDS IT’S A MUSIC FESTIVAL HELLO
Sunday
8:00a: Throw up
9:00a: Hit the Green Room
10:00a: Sink or Swim Rands Panel
11:30a: Decompression Hooch
2:00p: Keynote Conversation: Heather Armstrong / Jason Kottke
3:30p: Running your New Media Business
5:00p: Holistic Web Design: Finding the Creative Balance in Multi-Disciplined Teams
6:00p: The Cabel, Rands, DF Trio Play the Hits
Monday
8:00a: Finally Exercise
10:00a: Cluetrain: Seven Years Later
11:30a: Does your Blog have a Business?
2:00a: More Drinks Required Here
3:00p: Peter Morville Presentation: Ambient Findability
5:00p: How to Blog for Money by Learning From Comics
6:00p: Final Optional Booze Session
