South by Southwest rocked. I met a ton of interesting, creative people and came away with a lot of ideas. I definitely will be there next year and may even propose an idea for a panel.
Hands down, the best session I saw was How to Create Passionate Users, which was mostly presented by Kathy Sierra. Their blog kicks ass too. The best part is that she also lives in Boulder. Like, maybe a mile away from me, so I’ll be taking them out to lunch very soon. I can’t believe I didn’t know that, because I know a lot of folks around here. They have a book coming out later this year that I predict will become a huge best seller.
Some of the recurring themes that came out in the panels:
- Smaller is better. Start small and only deliver what’s necessary today.
- Complexity is evil. In his keynote Jason Fried advocated doing away with functional specs. (Of course, that’s potentially in conflict with Joel Spolsky, one of the panelists in another session, but I suspect they have more in common than different.)
- User communities rule. Threadless ships 60,000 t-shirts a month thanks to its 300,000 member community. (This reminds me of one of the predictions of “one to one marketing” several years ago: we’re approaching an age where business no longer create products and then find customers to buy them. Rather, now they’re finding customer first and then creating the products those customers ask for.)
- Great products will win, regardless of the marketplace. Basecamp is certainly not the first online project management tool, and it’s not the most full-featured, but it’s hugely popular.
- Venture capital bad, bootstrapping good. Oftentimes the people on the panels still had day jobs and were running their businesses part time. Contrast this with the late nineties, when you couldn’t get on a panel at the typical trade show unless you had $5 million in VC behind you. The only VC backed company I remember being on a panel was Six Apart, represented by Mena Trott, but I’m sure there were probably a few others. (Of course, Google and Yahoo did panels too, but those are mature, public companies.)
- Expect to fail often. Be happy that most of the time you get to do it in obscurity. (This led to one of my ideas for a panel discussion – My Biggest Failures or something like that, in which we get some of the biggest celebrities in the industry to tell all about the stupidest mistakes they’ve made on the path to geek superstardom.)
- Find a partner. This theme wasn’t stressed quite as much, but several times panelists commented about the importance of finding someone or multiple people to complement your strengths and minimize your weaknesses. I’m definitely thankful that we did that in my current venture. (This leads to the another session idea: Speed Dating for Designers and Developers.)
Other random thoughts:
- I park like an idiot is a brilliant business idea.
- Red vs. Blue is a hoot.
- It’s generally a very bad idea to have a blogger interview another blogger about blogging.
- Matt Mullenweg is mature beyond his years. He had some very insightful comments about how and why open source works. He’s also not so cool that he can’t be bothered to hand out t-shirts at the meetup.
- Austin is a cool place, but I’m turning into a Boulder snob. Too much traffic, humidity and heat for my taste.
- I finally get microformats and will start playing around with them. Starting here.
- Aussies are the funnest people to hang out with.
- Though hanging out with passionate people in general is the best. It was really nice to be at a show where nobody was there just because they were paid to be there, and where in fact many people sacrificed vacation days for the opportunity.
- Though deadly dull to talk about, copyright issues are very important and I’m thankful for the work Creative Commons is doing.
SXSW is very well run. They seemed to have figured out that special sauce of traditional top-down management to make things run smoothly, yet allowing enough freedom for good ideas and activities to bubble up from the bottom. As an example of the latter, they have a completely open community blog that anyone can post announcements to. Kudos to them for pulling off a great show at a really cheap price.