- The programmer / entrepreneur lifestyle

- Attractive

- Hits the "sweet spot" -- lets you be who you are

- It 's all about controlling your own destiny

- The trick is to find opportunities to build stuff and match it with people who

want that stuff

- Barrel research

- It' s a way of looking at markets and opportunities

- Think of all the markets and opportunities out there as the volume

within a barrel

- Think of anything released into the market as a rock dropped into the

barrel

- The size of the rock in the barrel represents the size of the

corresponding project or opportunity

- Big rocks represent big projects taken on by big organizations

- There are plenty of gaps between the big rocks , which can be filled in

by smaller stones , representing smaller projects executed by smaller teams

- It 's fractal -- there are smaller gaps between the smaller stones, which

can be filled in with sand, which represents even smaller projects by

even smaller teams.

- The ideal team size these days: about 3

- Our current tools allow us to create well-crafted stuff with a small team

- Consider icanhascheezburger.com -- employs 9 people

- "Happy end of the Mythical Man-Month"

- If you' re a hacker and have good hacker friends , you can do well

- With this in mind , what ideas should you implement ?

- "Late-bound ideas"

- You want to make multiple , small , narrowly - focused bets

- Act darwinistically -- take on a number of projects and cull those

that aren 't "fit to survive"

- Psychology and "Free"

- Cheap is not free

- Worry about spending money

- Small psychological inputs can have a very large impact

- Treat non-free things as dependencies -- try to get rid of them

- Eliminating non-free things is part of a larger process:

eliminating inefficiencies

- If a customer is worth $100 -- Google will try to charge me $99 for it

- Whoever your potential customer is, there' ll always be someone out there

who 's going to spend more money than you trying to land that customer

- Disproportional Reward

- This part of the talk is going to be all about market hacks,

"fuzzing the market" and getting a result that is disproportionately

greater than the time/effort/money you put in

- They' re all tech - driven : does not require you to be a salesperson

- These approaches are tech - and marketing - based

1 . Breaking into the walled garden

- PayMe . com was Pepsi to PayPal 's Coke, with about 10% market share

- We realized that auction buyers would be the big adopters of

systems like ours, so we approached eBay who wouldn' t take our ads

because of an exclusive agreement

- We found out that eBay had relationship with LinkExchange -- they sold

a lot of ads in eBay

- We bought out LinkExchange ads , many of which ended up appearing on

eBay pages as per their arrangement , effectively doing an end run

around eBay 's refusal, getting out ads on their pages against their

wishes

- Exploiting this non-obvious relationship made our company successful

2. Baby' s Mamma

- The parenting market has a strong geographic component : new parents

tend to clump together in the same neighbourhoods

- Certain postal codes are parent - rich

- Going after parents ? Find out where new schools are being built --

that 's where they are

- School websites post which of their teachers are going on maternity

leave -- send their colleagues coupons!

- Take a page from the stalker book: use readily-available demographic

information, sych as driver' s licence registration , voter info

registration

- Do analysis on that information

- Look for info that ties them to a specific demographic -- consider

names that belong to specific generations , like "Hildegarde"

- Use Freedom of Information Act requests

- For example , Nate 's dad gets an National Science Founation

database of people who just got funding and uses it

to cold call them

- Often, he would be the first person to inform them that they

got the funding, making him the bearer of good news and thus

more likely to make the sale

3. Tai Chi Marketing

- I wrote a script to auto-fill contact forms that I knew would lead to

my getting called by a telesales person

- I got calls from telesales people, whose jobs are tough

- I' d explain that I wasn 't likely to buy what they were selling, but

told them that I have a product that would make their job easier;

could they introduce me to their boss?"

- End result: an inbound sales call was redirected and turned into a

sale to them

- Making emotional connection with people is key

"At this point in the list, we' re now approaching that fine line that

separates an entrepreneur from a criminal

4 . Dorm Spam

- My first job : selling white box computers at dorms , a la Michael Dell

- My major cost : shipping flyers

- So I used the inter - campus mail system to send the flyers

5 . Tragedy of the Commons for Fun and Profit

- This was in the era of desktop - based file - sharing clients like Scour ,

Kazaa and eDonkey

- Shared a lot of windows media files with the names of popular videos and

movies

- . WMV files back then could include an instruction to pop open a browser

window pointing to a specific URL when the file was played

- We used this as advertising

Don 't short this stuff:

- As programmers, we have a tendency to bury ourselves in coding when things

get tough

- Some problems can' t be solved with tech