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My notes from Roberta Conner’s presentation at the inaugural TEDx Portland presentation.

Roberta Conner
Director Tamastslikt Cultural Institute
  • The name my grandmother gave me when I was 13 references a time when the glaciers were melting, and the land was flooding. It’s an old name.
  • 100 years ago my grandmother was standing on the banks
  • take care of your body. 
  • bears eat berries, birds eat berries, you are not the only consumer of these berries.
  • all things must be in balance: man and woman, day and night, abundance and scarcity.
  • when things are out of balance, you can tell. there will be more scarcity for some. you can tell when there is too much testosterone or estrogen in a room.
  • we are laying to rest the elders who learned languages as children, as opposed to those who are learning it today in the classroom.
  • we humans don’t make the earth turn, or the moon shine. we are humble.
  • indigenous cultures who are trying to keep their cultures alive are trying to protect an enormous database of ecological information that can protect us.
  • we know things like where there are condor habitat, that scientists don’t know.
  • there is no world for wilderness in our language because all places are known. all places are some indigenous tribes home. 
  • culture and language teach us that we are not the most important thing. we are not in charge of the wildlife or animals.
  • the places with the lowest economic development have the greatest wildlife. the industrial revolution passed those places by. this is good. all things in balance.
  • indigenous names and languages help us maintain our store of knowledge. it is not meant to leave anyone out.
  • scientists and indigenous speakers need each other. 
  • living in a place for thousand and thousands are empirical and longitudinal. it’s not double blind, but we know what a place’s carrying capacity is. we know what happens when a place is overhunted or overpopulated.
  • we know that roads don’t belong in river bottoms. we know that garbage and pollution cannot accumulate.
  • live as though your ancestors thousands of years from now will live in your backyard.

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I’m at TEDx Portland, the first Portland TED event.

The first speaker today was Greg Bell, very inspiring. Here’s my notes from his talk.

Greg Bell
  • What if you started your day by clapping for each other?
  • The cynics and the negaholics are winning.
  • We need to ask ourselves different questions. if you ask yourself lousy questions, you get lousy answers.
  • Ask yourself:
    • what’s going well?
  • Even the negaholic can find something. “At least I woke up.”
  • When you wake up, it sets the tone for your day. And when you go to sleep, it sets the tone for your dreams.
  • Before my toes hit the ground, I set the tone for the day: What’s going well?
  • “I am from another planet…. I grew up in Texas.”
  • I grew up in a house with no indoor plumbing. We were so poor. So poor you can’t even imagine it.
  • But we never knew it.
  • Because of my grandfather.
  • A brilliant man, it was like living with socrates, aristotle, and plato all in one.
  • he would farm the land. my job was to bring water to him.
  • he always had a big smile on his face, and he would drop a pearl of wisdom.
  • love and wisdom multiply.
  • crossroads
    • important for us to think about
    • which way do we go in our lives?
    • three roads of battle: with ourselves, each other, and nature.
  • you are a miracle. everybody in this room is a miracle.
  • when you point to yourself, you point to your heart. follow your heart, clear your mind, and 
  • giant timber bamboo. the farmer will water the seed for a year, and see nothing. they water it for another year, and another year. but then it grows 1 1/2 feet per day to a height of 90 feet. one grove grew at 4 feet per day.
  • Water The Bamboo: Feed your dreams.
    • people will diminish your dreams. “what are you doing over there?” they don’t see anything. tell them to mind their own bamboo.
    • grandfather said “everyone gets an acre. take care of your acre.”
    • we have to be a bit more patient than our instant gratification society.
  • it takes time. 
    • no farmer in the world would ever dig up a seed to see if it is growing.
  • be a bamboo farmer.
  • have patience, persistence, discipline. 
  • None of are perfect. We need courage, because there is doubt in us.
  • Bring your heart and spirit to your life.
  • You have to have belief. How do you do that? How you talk to yourself. What your language is like. 90% of conversations are with yourself. Change your language.
  • All great things start in your head.
  • Confucius said “every great journey starts with a single step.” but really it out to start with a compass or a map or someone to follow. where are we going?
  • Happy people like what’s happening. If you make your values your habit, then you would like what’s happening, and then you would be happy.
  • find something you can do in the next 24 hours, 48 hours around your values. one thing, no matter how small. you will be happy.
  • We have math classes, and science class, but we don’t have relationship classes. What do you care about more, algebra or relationships?

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Thanks to John D. Brown’s blog post on the role of plot in creating reader suspense, I came across this wonderful excerpt from an interview with Alfred Hitchcock:

“There is a distinct difference between ‘suspense’ and ‘surprise’, and yet many pictures continually confuse the two. I’ll explain what I mean. 

“We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let us suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, ‘Boom!’ There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table, and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware that the bomb is going to explode at one o’clock and there is a clock in the décor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions this same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. 

“The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: ‘You shouldn’t be talking about such trivial matters. There’s a bomb underneath you and it’s about to explode. 

“In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second case we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story.” 

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Author and editor John D. Brown has written a series of articles on creating reader suspense at the Craft of Writing blog at the Science Fiction Writers Association website.

The blog posts are wonderful, however the SFWA site won’t display them in chronological order, forcing you to read them backwards are puzzle through pages of posts. I’ve arranged links to the articles in chronological order below:

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I read a great interview with Jerry Lawson, video game and computer industry pioneer, who recently passed away. Mr. Lawson was a black engineer in an industry that was almost entirely white. In his interview, not only does he talk about a fascinating period of time (interviewing Steve Jobs for an engineering position, the first computers, the first video games), but he also shares his perspective on the role of race in engineering careers.

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Here’s a summary of key insights from SXSW Interactive 2011.

15 Slides, 3 Writers

At 15 Slides, 3 Writers, we learned about three different writers’ techniques on the same fifteen twelve topics. A few key insights:

  1. All of the writers favored very simple text editors, such as BBEdit. They didn’t want the distractions of a more complex editor.
  2. There was a common theme around writing first thing in the morning.
  3. If they get stuck, they change context, either by: going away and coming back to it later, going back and working on grammer and structure issues in the earlier part of the writing, or changing colors on the screen to create a new visual context.
  4. They proof in a different context: either they print it out, or they publish to the web and read it there, where it just looks different as compared to their editor.
Tim Ferriss

Tim Ferriss spoke about the 4 Hour Body,  about which I have written plenty, including this nifty cheat sheet. A few insights:

  1. The 4 Hour Body was the result of more than 10 years of data gathering, and 3 years of intensive experimentation.
  2. The Extremes Inform the Mean, not Vice-Versa: Example given was a design firm working on garden shears: didn’t want to know about the mean user. They wanted to know about the extremes: the parapalegic who was gardening. the elderly user. If they could design for the extreme, the middle will be taken care of.
  3. Make it a game (Drucker and five sessions). People who do something 5 times will keep doing it.
    Rig the first 5 sessions so you’ll keep doing: go to gym for 15 minutes, not 3 hours.
  4. The best protocol doesn’t matter if you abandon it.
  5. Q: From your new book, what could you apply back to the 4 Hour Work Week?
    A: Richard Branson was asked what thing to do to be more productive, and he said “work out”
    There is a lot to provide that exercise has a big positive impact on learning, cognitive ability, and productivity. Use exercise/recreation to bracket your day: before and after.
  6. Some fantastic doctors out there. But… C=MD. As long as you pass your tests, you get an MD. There is always someone who is the worst in their class. The average healthcare visit is 11 minutes. Many times a doctor doesn’t or can’t spend the time to work with you.
Be Heard: How to Drive Innovation at Big Companies.

Hey! This was my talk. Here are a few sources for more information:

Christopher Poole Keynote Address

Chris Poole, founder of 4chan, gave a keynote address. Key insights:

  1. In comparison to Mark Zuckerberg, who believes authenticity can only come through identity, Poole believes people need the ability to be anonymous to be authentic. Trying to explain to this someone, I came up with the following analogy: We do and say certain things at work, and do and say certain things with our friends, and we don’t always want the two to cross. So it does make sense that different identities with different groups allows us to more fully behave the way we want to behave in that group, as opposed to constantly filtering our behavior.
  2. People focus on scaling as an architecture problem. The real problem is not scaling, it’s building a community worth scaling. 4chan was not an overnight success. it’s been a slow steady build over 8 years. there was no hockey stick. The core community forms over time. With Poole’s new site, Canvas, there is concern about the culture growing: if they let 10,000 people into the site tomorrow, it would destroy the fragile culture that is developing.
  3. Some way for the quiet many to participate makes a big difference in the life of the community: In canvas, like all other communities, a small percentage of users create all the content. They wanted to create a new middle ground – so they made virtual stickers which could be dragged and put onto other posts. Now you didn’t need to be an artist to create visual content. 100,000 stickers placed in a few weeks.
Why New Authors Should Think Like Indie Bands
Key insights:
  1. Historically self-publishing has been looked down upon by traditional press. But in the comic industry, it’s the complete opposite. You have to be self-published, to prove you are committed, you have an audience. That will start to happen in the traditional publishing.
  2. All three authors on the panel extensively used social media, especially Twitter, but also Facebook, to represent themselves professionally, stay abreast of editors and keep track of editor/author relationships, and of course key in touch with readers.
  3. The marketing/publishing people are obsessed with how many hits my blog gets, what are the search terms, how many followers and friends do I have. [I saw this echoed at other writer’s conferences as well.]
  4. I took my self-published book, which was $15 for the printed book, and did a $2.99 book on Kindle. It was slow for a while, but sales have taken off, and they’ve even driven up the sales of the printed copy.
  5. My main motivation is to have as many people read my stuff as possible. I don’t care how it happens, I just want it to happen.
  6. You always have to do the marketing yourself, even if it’s a traditional publisher. You have to market the book, and you always have. Now it’s just easier to do. Once upon a time you had to get in the car and drive to every bookstore in the country. Now you can get a national or international following through online tools.
The Singularity: Humanity’s Huge Techno Challenge
As both of my sci-fi books are tightly focused on the singularity, I had high hopes for this panel. Unfortunately Lenat and Vassar covered similar material to last year. You can find my full notes here.
I actually think this might be better formatted as a core conversation. Sure, they are the experts, but let’s get some fresh perspective on this.

Freelancers: You’re Five Products Away From Freedom


This talk by Thomas Myer was a lot of fun. The premise was that if you can develop a product you can sell and make $100 per month, then you can repeat that process ten times, and start to build up an income stream. Full session notes. A few highlights:

  1. Wrote eight books. Not a lot of money, but checks still do trickle in. No need to provide tech support, which is nice.
  2. Wrote backup software, which was a plugin for a platform of some type. Turned out to be tricky and require a lot of tech support calls. But then it turned out that much of the same code could be leveraged horizontally, so that he could release backup software for a different platform. Gave him more product reach.
  3. Wrote a few iPhone apps. Very simple apps to solve very specific problems: e.g. writers encounter writer’s block or need ideas, and the app is an idea generator. The UI design is extremely simplistic, but that doesn’t matter: solving the customer’s need is what matters.
  4. Examples of assorted information and teaching businesses: produce a video on how to do X, then sell access to the video online.
  5. Donations doesn’t seem to be viable. Needs to be an actual payment for a product. 
Gamestorming

Gamestorming is a technique to facilitate an ideation meeting that is a cross between too much chaos and too much structure. It uses game techniques to make it fun while still oriented towards a goal. Full session notes. Probably the best thing to do is to buy the book Gamestorming, which I plan to do.

CLOUD CAMP
There was a several hour long cloud camp at SXSW. This is the second one I’ve attended, and I like that they are run as an unconference. Here are my full notes from SXSW, and here are my note from 2010’s cloud camp in Portland.

Here are excerpts from two presenters at Cloud Camp.

Gene Kim

My long time buddy Gene Kim, founder and former CTO of Tripwire, spoke about devops.

Key insights:

  1. Now more than ever, we need great IT operations. Organizations are held up by the ability to get features released, get things through operations. It’s not just an operations problem, it’s a development problem and a business problem.
  2. They benchmarked 1,300 organizations – to link controls and performance. High performance organizations exist and they are 4-5 times more productive than ordinary organizations.
    1. High performers find and fix security break fast
    2. Unplanned work comes at the expense of planned work
  3. Traditional organizations have a Vicious Downward Spiral:
    1. Too many fragile applications (prone to failure) -> Too much time spent firefighting and in unplanned work -> Planned project work cannot complete
    2. Downtime causes frustrated customers to leave, while features fall further and further behind -> Market share goes down
    3. More urgent, date-driven projects put into the queue -> Even more fragile code put into production
    4. More releases have turbulent installs -> Release cycles lengthen to amortize cost of deployments -> Bigger deployment are more likely to fail, and more difficult to diagnose
  4. Zone #1 for improvements: 
    1. Decrease cycle time of releases
    2. Create determinism in the release process
    3. Move packaging responsibility to development
    4. Release early and often
    5. Decrease release cycle time (example: Reduced deployment time from 6 hours to 45 minutes)
    6. Never fix forward, instead “roll back”, escalating any deviation from plan to Dev
    7. Verify for all handoffs (e.g. correctness, accuracy, timeliness, etc.)
Earnest Mueller

Earnest Mueller from National Instruments also spoke on devops. I found his very explicit details of how their web development/operations team works to be fascinating. A few highlights:

  1. The Process:
    1. Agile
    2. All systems work used the “developer” tools and systems [Revision control: Perforce / Bug Tracking: HP / Specs and reviews: Atlassian Confluence Wiki / Task tracking and burndown: JIRA/Greenhopper]
    3. All members collaborate on all aspects of the product. This was the key to making it work – using all the same tools. We could prioritize better, because it was all in one system.
    4. There can be a fear that the systems tasks would always get pushed out. This seemed to be mistaken impression. When presented alongside requirements in the same requirements tool, decision makers seemed to understand the need for systems work.
  2. System Automation
    1. We built our own: PIE, the “Programmable Infrastructure Environment”
    2. Looked at Chef/Puppet, and others. What we needed wasn’t quite any of those.
    3. XML System model defines systems, services, code installs, runtime interaction, variable substitutions
    4. PIE autobuilds the system from the model: provisioning, software installs, monitoring integration
    5. Zookeeper as a runtime registry for systems info and eventing
    6. Allows us to start/stop/control/install/autoscale on bunches of dynamic environments
    7. We have our dev environment, test environment, production environment – multiplied across our many products. We could deploy a new environment in a couple of hours.
  3. Challenges
    1. Overcoming the thought that it was impossible: Can i do infrastructure tasks using agile? with sprints? By actually trying it, it turns out to be possible. Write our own software provisioning sounds hard, maybe we can’t do it. but when you try it, you can.
    2. Building trust between dev and ops: Working together in one team and using the same tools really helps. You get transparency. You can’t build the sense of trust when you don’t know what each other are working on.
    3. Explaining core web development/performance/availability/management needs to desktop developers. Needed to write “why you should log” paper to explain core concepts

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Gene Kim and I organized a session at SXSW Interactive this past weekend. Our topic was Be Heard: How to Drive Innovation in Big Companies.

Gene already shared some of the work we did to prepare for the presentation.

I wanted to share a few more thoughts while they were fresh in my mind. This is my own opinion – if you were there, I’d love to get your perspective. Here are our lessons learned from presenting at SXSW.

The Good


1. We got right to the point, and built energy quickly.


We started with a vision: to get the session started quickly, establish credibility, tell a story to build energy and give an example, and then get going. We didn’t want to get bogged down.

Keeping that vision firmly in mind, we refined the content relentlessly. We had started in early February, shortly after we learned that our proposal was accepted. I had written a half dozen personal stories, and we each wrote bios.

By the time we both had gotten to SXSW, I had 15 minutes of material I was planned to cover. However, I could feel the energy lagging just rehearsing the content, and I knew 15 minutes was much too long to make the audience wait for a session that was intended to be audience-driven.

We spent about eight hours together in person at SXSW refining the talk until we had the minimum amount of material that established our vision for how the session would go.

2. We didn’t waste time building motivation.

There were 48 programming slots for 12:30pm on Saturday. That meant that anyone who came to our session came because they were interested in our title and our session descriptive. So we didn’t need to convince anyone who was there was it was important. By choosing our session out of the 48, it was a sure sign they thought it was important.

Therefore, we focused on making sure people left with actionable tips and techniques. We’ll leave the motivational stuff to the keynote speakers.

3. We involved the audience both in soliciting the problem statement and in offering the solutions.

Knowing that it was a core conversation format, the expectation is to involve the audience. And one of the unique characteristics I’ve noticed about SXSW is just how smart everyone is: You could pick any person at random and have a very interesting conversation with them. Everyone is an expert in their area.

Therefore, we expected people to know more than us, much more. So not only did we want the audience to offer solutions, but we also wanted to make sure we got the inventory of problem types from them as well. This also gets to the actionable techniques: they are only actionable if they match a problem you are having.

4. We time boxed the problem solicitation portion, the brainstorming for each problem area, and each problem.

We knew that one downside that can occasionally occur with core conversations is lagging energy, or a slow pace. If someone comes up and hogs the mic, or if you spend too much time in an area that large swaths of the audience isn’t interested in, energy and attention lags.

So we time boxed everything. (As it turns out, I don’t think we ever had to cut off an individual speaker. Yay. I wasn’t looking forward to that.)

The Bad


1. Too little sleep.
We stayed up until 2am the night before refining the talk, and then got back up at 7am to continue working on it. It would have been nice to have gotten more sleep.
2. No memorization.
Because we kept refining the talk up until the last minute, I couldn’t memorize the content. And because I had originally memorized much more content (15 minutes worth), had I tried to wing it, I would likely go too long.
Gene encouraged sticking to the prepared content, even if that meant reading from the paper. There’s no point in investing dozens of hours in refining language to ignore all that work.
3. Too much time on problem solicitation.
We spent a few minutes too many on the problem statement, and should have moved earlier into solutions. I don’t think it was terrible, but we should have gone into solution brainstorming at least 5 minutes earlier.

The Forgotten
1. Names, email addresses, twitter handles, and websites.

There was no projector to put up our names or contact information, nor a flip chart to write them on. Ideally SXSW would provide this, but given that they did not, we should have spent more time telling people our names, twitter handles, and websites.

We would like to connect with people and have the opportunity for follow up.

2. Continuing the conversation

In retrospect, we would have loved have planned a big dinner at a restaurant, and then extend an invitation to everyone at the session. It would have been a great way to talk longer with people who otherwise had to run off to the next session.
3. Feedback
We should have asked for feedback, which is crucial to SXSW organizers, and helps speakers if they propose a topic for the next year.

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Gamestorming
Dave Gray – Dachis Group, VizThink, XPLANE co-founder @davegray
James Macanufo – XPLANE @macgeo
Sunni Brown – Ogilvy @sunnibrown
#gamestorming
  • imagine it’s your job to facilitate a meeting. the stakes are to solve global warming. you only have a day. you have the people in the room. what do you do?
  • options
    • the boredom of business as usual
      • agenda 9am 10am 11am
      • slides being projected
      • boring as hell
      • people are checking their email
      • the smart people get an important phone call and have to leave
    • chaos of creativity
      • post it notes
      • everyone talks over each other
      • it’s wild and crazy
      • they feel kinda good, they generated a million ideas
      • but at the end of the day you have a million post it notes, and that’s it.
    • nothingness <——> chaos
  • how would you like to be the meeting jedi?
  • everything starts with energy
    • it’s true of people, cars, and meetings
  • camp fire vs forest fire
    • one is out of control, and one is in control
    • one will kill you, and one will keep you warm
  • require a spark + fuel to keep going
  • a campfire has a structure you design in.
  • business at usual = no fire, chaos meeting = forest fire
  • energy will follow the path of least resistance
    • traffic will flow through streets
    • water through channels
    • ball down hill
    • you can structure where the energy goes in a meeting
  • What kind of result do you want?
    • new ideas, agreement, tough decisions, problem-solving, unraveling complexity
  • Monopoly
    • board world
    • pieces: players
    • objects: properties, houses
    • making flow: rules, flow around board
    • breaking flow: dice, chance
  • Gamestorming
    • Players
    • objects: sticky notes, index cards
    • whiteboard = world
    • making flow: rules, flow
    • breaking flow: shuffling
  • Tools on the Table
    • Firestarting
    • Sketching
    • Improvisation
    • Meaningful
  • Firestarting
    • you should never go into a meeting with no idea of how to ignite conversation
    • strategically have a provocative question that gets people engaged and dictates where the conversation will go
      • fill in the blank: I want my appliances to start telling me ________________
  • Sketching
    • is visual language
    • is just as important or more important than text based language
    • having a meeting with just text is like having the meeting with one hand tied behind your back
    • you don’t have to be divinci 
  • Improvisation
    • it creates possibilities
    • if you are in a meeting, and are only comfortable with not being surprised, you’ll only get predictable stuff
    • being comfortable with the possibility of something going terrible wrong
  • Meaningful space
    • we think an idea is a lightning bolt or isolated incident
    • it’s a bunch of neurons firing in sync at the same time in a new way
    • you need a space which is going to stimulate neurons to fire
    • an ordinary space is not going to generate new neuron patterns
  • always try something new, keep it fresh
  • MEME MACHINE game
    • treat the room as a giant computer
    • lots of parallel processing
  • AWESOMENESS app
    • Phase 1:
      • pick your favorite software app and your favorite physical product
      • think of a new business idea using attributes of both
      • on a card, create a “pitch slide” to sell your idea
    • Phase 2:
      • Move awesome ideas to the front
      • move lame ideas to the back
      • Move serious ideas to the left
      • move funny ideas to the right
      • ideas migrate: you have to sell people on the direction you think it should go.
      • it’s a series of pair-wise trades
  • Bringing it back to work
    • 3 personalities you are likely to meet
      • the ghost
        • we never follow through
          • we get lots of good ideas, and we never do anything with it.
          • good ideas die on the vine
        • solution
          • write things down. create artifacts.
          • the ghost thrives in the dark.
          • a challenge with distributed teams is that we have no tangible artifacts. 
          • paper is great technology.
          • put the paper on the wall.
      • the bad apple
        • not while i’m here
          • the person who shows up late, question the process, shits on someone’s idea, and then leaves early
        • challenge the notion of this prototype
          • “creative bad apple”: i’m too creative for this
          • “busy bad apple”: i am too busy for this, i have to attend 3 or 4 meetings at the same time.
        • solution
          • if you have to engage with them, give them something to do. give them a job, a role in the meeting.
            • you are going to be the scribe
          • plenty of good techniques (p.61 in the book) to insure people don’t dominate the meeting
          • make it voluntary: if they don’t want to be there, give them the option to leave.
      • the kid
        • i wanna play. play fair!
          • you’re going to have people who just want to share their point of view.
        • solutions
          • kids are showing up to this playground, and your job is to ensure they can play well together.
  • Try this:
    • 4-5 people
    • small room, no desks. compress the space – physically intimate
    • provocative question
    • open it and close it – 90 minutes
  • The book: 
  • Want to try it out with a friendly community?
    • VizThink has local communities all over the world, and they are doing gamestorming.

  • Questions

    • Q: Some cultures are conservative. What can you do?
      • You respect their culture, and get them to take a step.
      • It may be success just to get them to use post-it notes.
      • Stretch their comfort zone just a bit.
      • Run a short 20 minute game, and they will have a positive experience. Then you can do on bigger scale.
      • most people are grateful just not to be bored.
    • Q: When kids that have different learning styles, when you provide them an opportunity to learn it in a way that meets their style, they learn best. if you ask them to do things they are not comfortable.
      • It’s a choice between boredom/disengaged and engagement/uncomfortable, it’s better to have engagement.
      • gamestorming incorporates all forms of learning styles.
      • Most meetings are generally highly skewed by verbal/writing modalities. so the people most threatened by gamestorming are likely to be those really good at verbal/writing. The loss in participation from those people are more than made up by the increase in participation from the people who are normally left out.

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Freelancers: You’re Five Products Away From Freedom
Thomas Myer
@myerman
#sxswproducts
  • How many of you have products? (many)
  • How many of you are making the money you want to make from those products (none)
  • PSA: http://sxsw4japan.org trying to raise at least $50k, already at $40k.
  • What does freelancing look like?
    • my neighbors thinks maybe i am drug dealer.
    • the hardest thing I do all day is walk outside in my bathroom.
  • $100/month -> $100/week -> $100/day.
    • I will probably never be 100% free from clients. 
    • My first litmus test: can I make $100 per month? If I can do 10 of those, then I’ve got some money that can make a difference. It’s not enough to stop working, but it is enough to turn down the worst clients.
    • From there, can I get to $100/week. Because ten of those is $4K/month, which is a substantial contribution.
    • And the end goal is $100/day. Then you could stop working.
  • What would happen to my business if I went away for two weeks?
    • As a freelancer, my business would not survive. I am my business.
  • 5 Guys in Kilts
  • When you go into the product business, you do things you might not otherwise do. You get a tech support call, and you have to field it.
  • You make money all the time. You wake up, and you have five orders. You have money.
  • Get Off My Lawn
  • http://myerman.com
  • http://tripledogs.com
  • Written eight books
    • Six month lead time
    • Do lead to little checks here and there
    • “Lead Generation on the Web”: Took two weeks to write. Still get checks from it.
  • ExpressionEngine
    • Didn’t have a backup utillity
    • So wrote one.
    • But lots of tech calls about weird problems
    • Took about a week to write.
    • Went to $100/month almost immediately.
    • You must have tech support. Because customers get really pissed if they have to wait even 24 hours. 
    • Makes money, but not that profitable because of all the support calls.
  • Mojo Addons
    • Backdoor: Allows the admin to never be locked out by the client.
    • Backup: Allows to backup.
  • Built horizontally: If you write a backup utility for one platform, then port it to many platforms, and leverage the investment you have.
  • You have to write a readme and other support document, because it beats having to answer 50 support calls.
  • Report: So, You Think Your Children Are Safe on Facebook?
    • $17 ebook on Lulu.
    • Not going through any publisher.
  • StoryStarter
    • iPhone app to randomly generate a protagonist, antagonist, setting. 
    • Started selling
    • Then wrote StoryPrompter, then BlogPrompts.
    • Each took less than 3 days to write and ship.
    • Got 500 suggestions on what to do next, including things like “include a genre”.
    • The real people in the marketplace are the only ones that matter.
  • 26-year old Amanda Hockling
    • making $2 million per year from Amazon kindle sales
    • Publishers don’t give you an advertising budget or any help pushing your book
  • 99 cents -> $2.99 -> 99 cents -> $2.99
    • You sell at 99 cents, and start to move up
    • Then when you are at top of best seller list, you sell at $2.99 to make money.
    • When you move back down the bestseller list, you go back to 99 cents.
  • Making 10% of 7 dollars from Amazon for a book that sells for $40.
    • For a book that sells at $2.99, and you keep 70%, you are keeping more.
  • For $97 you can learn how to become a freelance social media manager.
    • Let’s Get Social – The Most In Demand Job in the World.
    • 43 minute page.
    • Lots of content to help sell it, but at $97, it is worth it.
    • And then sells access to her time/network, limited to $10/month.
  • Basecamp
  • WooThemes: WordPress themes for all types of web publishers http://woothemes.com 
    • design web themes, and then sell them.
  • Genesis – web site design. $97. Awesome new web look in an hour.
  • “Build Your Own Wicked WordPress Themes”
  • Create a teaching business
    • Teaching Sells
    • Put together workshop materials / interactive learning environment. 
    • $100 product. You become a member, get access to their goodies.
    • If you are an expert in a topic, you can put together the content. It could be about tech, gardening, knitting.
  • Clickbank
    • affiliate network of products
    • you make the product, it goes through the clickbank platform
    • other people in the network sell your product and take 50%.
    • more than $1B in sales for clients
  • Etsy
    • crochet pattern: party pet costume
    • it is so much easier to sell via etsy than to try to put the internet pages up yourself.
    • the time saved can be used to make more products.
  • Questions
    • Q: Do you have one LLC or many?
      • We became an S-Corp a long time ago, and haven’t really thought about it since.
      • Don’t attempt any of this as a sole proprietor because there aren’t enough legal protections. 
      • If there is something not congruent with triple dog media, we might create another imprint.
    • Q: What’s this about basecamp?
      • 37signals got tired of working with clients. they made basecamp, sold 50,000 seats at $5, and suddenly they no longer had to have clients.
      • lesson: productive your process.
      • lesson: take something ugly and complex and simplify and beautify it.
    • Q: What about piracy?
      • O’Reilly says: it’s just the cost of doing business. 
      • But O’Reilly makes it easy to get the live edition, get updated information. make it easy.
      • You can get the o’rielly books via bittorrent, but o’reilly sells a ton of books. 
    • Q: How do you choose a product?
      • it’s got to be viable to generate $100/month
      • tiny little group for whom you can totally solve a problem: the number one complaint of authors is that they need ideas.
    • Q: What do you think of sites that ask for donations, or kickstart where you ask to raise money?
      • I’ve never found that it works to ask for donations. 
    • Q: You showed several different options for learning products. How do you decide where to distribute? all of them? focus on one?
      • I’ve been trying all the different ones, and seeing what works.
      • We can launch a book on pay.com, and start getting metrics immediately. “oh, it sells at 2am in japan.”
      • The 80/20 rule takes place almost immediately once you start getting data back.
      • If you have to find out where the fish are.
    • Q: What if you are trying to do video? None of them seem to work very well.
      • Yes, you are right.
      • You need optimization to convert page impressions to sales. because we can see many cases of 5,000 impressions, and 0 sales.
      • video could help with that by showing off the product
    • Q: You are apologetic about your UI. But you focus explicitly on your market. You are just a doer. Any advice about what to do if you are more hesistant because we are perfectionists?
      • No one will know what you are putting out there. You are not Apple. You don’t have a global brand. Just put it out there. Then you are a doer.