MicroConf 2011
Hi, I'm Patrick Foley, and I work for Microsoft.
My job is to
help other software companies.
A few months ago, my friends Mike Taber and Rob Walling, founders of the Micropreneur Academy, got the crazy idea to host a conference for bootstrappers like them - MicroConf - for self-funded startups and solo entrepreneurs. They asked me if Microsoft wanted to sponsor, and I was thrilled that the Windows Azure team said yes. "The cloud" is a great fit for startups, and Windows Azure is Microsoft's cloud offering.
As a bonus, this meant I got to attend the conference myself. I love startups - I host a podcast for startups with Bob Walsh, and I have a dream of following in Patrick McKenzie's footsteps (Patrick was one of the speakers) and creating a successful startup as a side project. According to Noah Kagan (another speaker), this makes me a "wannapreneur" ...
To make the sponsorship more fun, we decided to give away an Xbox 360 with Kinect. Rather than just GIVE it away, I wanted to figure out a way to get people to learn about Azure in order to qualify for the drawing, so I created this site. If I was creating a site, I might as well make it available for people outside of the conference as well, so I got a second Xbox 360/Kinect to give away so that people who didn't attend the conference had a chance to win, too. I got a bit carried away ... the first iteration of the site was way too complicated - I wanted to make it more like a scavenger hunt, because we have so many offers I wanted to tell people about. It had AppSumo branding, because I was hoping they could promote the drawing as well. Noah (Chief Sumo of AppSumo) gave me a ton of useful help and feedback, but in the end, I couldn't put together an offer that fit for them, so I dropped that branding.
Mike Taber told MicroConf
attendees to go to the site if they wanted to win an Xbox, and then a funny thing happened ... I got instant usability testing
and feedback about what I was trying to do. I tried and tried to
simplify things, but it's hard! This iteration is the simplest yet, and
it's still probably too complicated. Because I didn't anticipate key
usability factors such as spotty wi-fi and need for mobile (not everyone
had their laptops open),
I ended up having Mike do a simple drawing for the Xbox
anyway - Aaron Scott won (and I was happy that he did in fact use this site to
learn about Windows Azure and give it a try).
This kind of learning - about things like getting user feedback and iterating - was the whole point of the conference. Speakers like Ramit Sethi and Hiten Shah and Patrick McKenzie are experts at this sort of thing, and I found it fascinating that the same marketing principles apply to one-person startups as well as huge companies like Microsoft. Companies like Microsoft just spread those activities across multiple people and departments. This can give smaller companies an advantage, because it forces people to understand the big picture more. For example, Hiten spoke about using surveys to guide marketing and product development, and I got the impression that he'd run a survey on Monday, implement the feedback on Tuesday, and test the results on Wednesday. Big companies have much longer cycles for surveys, but I suspect shorter cycles are better.
So I'm at the conference, ostensibly to "sell" Windows Azure, and the whole time I'm learning all this great marketing wisdom from the speakers ... I'm learning exactly what I need to improve with my own efforts marketing Microsoft products (I'm an evangelist - the role is essentially marketing a specific product like Windows Azure to a specific group of people like startup founders in a specific geography). Practicing techniques learned at the conference to sell to the confererence attendees - it was an oddly "meta" experience (and a lot of fun).
I learned the most from the "web teardown" sessions by Ramit, Hiten, and Patrick. For these sessions, they simply reviewed attendee websites and talked about how they could perform better (i.e., convert more sales). Common themes were to use:
- A really simple call-to-action
- Words that your customers use instead of marketing nonsense
NOTE: If this sounds like stuff you need to learn, then stop reading this and go read Patrick McKenzie's recent guest post at Fog Creek. That's an incredibly concise, 10-minute read about what it takes to improve your sales conversion. Patrick talks specifically about what he did for Fog Creek, and I think it's much easier to track a specific example than to understand general concepts.
My little startup happens to be a billion dollar business, but the same principles apply. Since the conference, I've been looking at my writing, and unfortunately, I naturally use a lot of marketing words. The best things I say aren't my words at all - they're things my customers say. It's easy to fix this, but it's going to take time, and I need to figure out an efficient way to record great comments from my customers (ones I know personally) and get permission from them to repeat what they say. I did use one great quote from my friend Matt Spradley, but clearly, I need to have more conversations with people who have succeeded on Windows Azure and pay much better attention to the words they use. One thing I noticed someone say at the conference was simply, "I didn't know Windows Azure could do that" in a conversation about supporting languages other than .NET. I changed this site to reflect that conversation.
So I've got a lot of work to do to be a better marketer, but using what I learned at the conference, I moved from a site that looked like this:
... to one that looks approximately like this:
We have a "funnel" of sorts that I was attempting to tap into - it's not 100% in my control, but it's useful to understand it's there. We want people to use Windows Azure. Before they commit, then tend to want to try it, so we created a free trial (what I'm pointing to above). We use promo codes for that, so it's easy to measure where they learned about it and figure out what works and what doesn't. There's more to the funnel ... before people can try Windows Azure, they have to learn about it ... so I tried to attach the Xbox 360 drawing to what I hope is a fun way to learn about the cloud and Windows Azure. Here is another area I need to improve - there's no reason to guess or to hope when I can measure. I need to learn how to measure and A/B test things like this. That way I can learn what really works. Also, I can't afford to give away Xbox 360's all the time, so I need to listen more to startups and pay better attention to the way they talk about the problems Windows Azure addresses - customer words are so much more effective than marketing words - if I can better explain how Windows Azure solves the problems startups care about, then I won't have to give something away to grab their attention.
In the process of struggling through marketing issues for this little promotion, I learned a lot about the types of marketing challenges startups face every day. This is a thread I'm going to continue to pursue with all the brilliant founders I get to interview on my podcast - I can't think of anything more important for software companies of any size, but especially startups.
The other speakers at MicroConf were great, too - in addition to various bits of prescriptive advice, they shared their personal stories of success and failure. They made it easy for new startups and "wannapreneurs" to imagine how they would act in similar cases. Common themes were perseverance, overcoming fears, and continuous learning (including measurement and testing). None of these extremely successful business people seemed endowed with any special hot sauce that helped them succeed where others failed (except Noah - he's all about the hot sauce). They just kept going and weren't afraid to pivot when they had to. Seems so simple.
MicroConf 2011 was a great conference. Please encourage Mike and Rob to have another one, and I hope to see you there.