Last week I went to a developer day event put on by Heroku. It was a small gathering focused on their Add-on providers program. This post isn’t a review of the developer day event, so I’ll just say it was very well done and I like the direction Heroku is headed. Instead, this is the answer to a question someone asked me that morning.
But before I tell you the question, let me tell you the answer.
Heroku announced the event about a month ahead of time. I wanted to attend, but it was in San Francisco so I had to weigh the cost of attending vs. staying in Boulder working on other aspects of StatsMix. One of the pros of going is this: I’m a big believer that we are entering an important new phase of app distribution. This has been happening on the phone for a while, obviously, but now it’s starting to happen in B2B cloud tools. A slew of PaaS providers like Heroku are coming out of the woodwork, and companies like StatsMix are piggybacking on their growth. The PaaS providers help us by making it easy to find, compare and install tools directly into their infrastructure. And we help them deliver a more feature-rich product for relatively low investment.
This is a megatrend. In five years practically every web app you use will be a one-click install for hosted infrastructure. The best example of where we are headed is to look at how WordPress plug-ins have evolved. The technology has matured to the point that you don’t have to go through the brain damage of downloading and unpacking files. You just click “Install Now” and voila!
But I digress.
My point, and I do have one, is that my company depends on the development of this trend, and I naturally want to do everything I can to accelerate it. So I asked myself, “How can I get the most bang for my buck for the cost of a trip to San Francisco?”
The answer was to put on an unconference. I figured a lot of other Add-on providers might be interested in getting together to share best practices, and I hoped other PaaS providers would want to be present at that meeting. So I emailed some of the folks I already knew in this space as well as cold-emailed others.
I was able to recruit about a half-dozen sponsors and 15 add-on providers to participate. The sponsors paid a modest fee in exchange for me organizing it. This covered our hard costs, made StatsMix more well-known the community at large and kick-started what I hope will become an important driver of industry growth.
That’s the long answer. The shorter answer is, I took a risk, then hustled like hell! There was no guarantee that this would work. And if interest had been weak I would’ve dropped the the idea.
But there was interest. However, interest alone doesn’t make shit happen! Scheduling conference calls, haranguing potential sponsors, figuring out where to get food, where to hold the event. None of these is that hard per se, but somebody has to do it and the best way to make sure it happens is to do it yourself. You have to be a catalyst even for tiny conferences.
And here’s the question that spurred this post: “How did you get all these PaaS providers to cooperate?”
Answer: I made shit happen!