MicroConf 2013 was Freakin’ Awesome

I had the opportunity to attend this years rendition of MicroConf in Las Vegas, NV, run by Rob Walling and Mike Tabor and attended by many great people. All I can say, I will be back next year.

MicroConf is a conference not for startups who took venture funding but rather those of us shoestring it and bootstrapping everything we do.

There is an overwhelming theme I noticed after talking to attendees; virtually everyone is doing some form of freelance consulting and wants to get out of it and move on to a product business. One speaker asked how many were on this path I would say 90% raised their hands. I think that says a lot.

Much of the move to a product based business from consulting almost always raises the question of how to begin the transition and how to replace the lucrative consulting work with paid products. Some demonstrated success with writing ebooks and using that revenue to replace consulting or as a launchpad for their SaaS offering.

Brennan Dunn?exemplifies taking this path.

For those who have never written a book it can be hard to imagine you have enough knowledge and experience to produce something of value. Patrick McKenzie was asked about this and his reply was “you know more than you think you know”. Solid advice for sure and provides encouragement for developers to consider this avenue of starting the product business.

Rob Walling started the first day with a challenge, where he asked attendees to create 3 actionable items from the event. I think I can boldly share mine:

1. Stop consulting and be 100% products by MicroConf 2014
2. Create and market and ebook?topic to come.
3. Finish and launch SimpleMailr.

As part of these goals I plan to generally improve my business skills in several areas:

• Marketing – this such a broad area but includes driving traffic to my business, by SEO understanding and implementation as well as better use of advertising (Google, Facebook and LinkedIn).
• Copywriting – honing skills of creating eye popping copy to pull people in.
• Design – this has always seemed like a black art to me. I plan to not become a designer but rather be more aware of design and the process to effectively create good design. It’s important to have enough skills to communicate the business needs to a qualified designer. It would be helpful to better understand design to take what a designer has to say to then relate to the business.

Christoph followed up with What You Can Learn From MicroConf 2013 – Even If You Did Not Attend (great use of copy hack from Joanna Wiebe‘s talk)

Some attendees wrote up their take or takeaways from the conference as well:?

• Hiten Shah
• Ben Curtis
• Scott Watermasysk – Lessons from MicroConf 2013
• Scott Watermasysk – MC Lesson 1: Cash Flow and Yearly Billing
• Scott Watermasysk – MC Lesson 2: Always Be Emailing
• Scott Watermasysk -?MC Lesson 3: Long Tail Marketing
• Tim Cull
• Robert Graham

I’m sure this list is far from exhaustive, but you get the idea. ??

The bottom line for me is this was a great conference that I will be back for next year. ?I walked away from this event with more excitement and to-dos for my business than ever before. ?If you didn’t attend this year, you should next year?*after* I have my ticket in hand.