Last Friday I went to the StackOver Flow Dev day in Cambridge. The day was arranged by Carsonified and hosted by Joel Spolsky of Fogbugz. I had never been to a Carsonified event so I was keen to see what the buzz was about.

On the face of it the schedule looked good, there were talks planned on jQuery, Python, .NET MVC and security. I took one of my lead developers with me  so we could both benefit and report back to the rest of the team. At the end of the day when the talks were over I was left feeling really disappointed, I thought it might just have been me but as I was talking to people they were all saying the same thing… the day felt like one big advert.

Now I would not have minded if this was a free seminar but we paid £85 each to be there. A large part of the day was devoted to Joel plugging his various services, Stack Overflow and associated products, his conferences and Fogbugz, I felt like I had paid to be part of an advert. That is not to say there were some good talks; Christian Heilmann from Yahoo was superb and introduced me to many Yahoo developer tools that I had never heard of (I will blog about these in the coming days).

The day got me thinking about how we spend our time at conferences and meetings. We need to treat it more like a business transaction as conferences cost money to attend (travel, food, hotel, ticket entry), as well as the opportunity cost of staff not working on billable projects. This cost is fine if the knowledge, connections and morale boost you get from a conference exceeds the monetary cost. But do people measure the ROI of going to conferences? Do you plan which conferences you will attend to maximise the benefit?

Perhaps this is much too mechanical way of looking at it, but I don’t want to go to a conference again and feel like it was a wasted day. Anyway rant over!

I went to a seminar at Imperial Business School yesterday “Innocent: Building a Business through Creativity and Design“with Dan Germain who is the head of creative at Innocent. Before the event I bought the new book documenting the first 10 years of innocent so I had a lot of context for the seminar. A lot of the content was taken directly from the book but it was still a worthwhile seminar.

It was an interesting talk and it was good to see a business that places so much emphasis on creativity. The main points I found interesting were:

In-house creative team

Innocent have quite a large in-house creative team relative to their size. This means that every aspect of the brand, design and messaging go through the one department. This means that there is a lot of consistency with anything that leaves the business.

Creative team veto

Dan and his team have a veto on anything that leaves the business. That means that if they are not happy then they have the power to stop anything even if all the other departments do not agree.

Focus on the product not the brand

The product is the most important thing, branding and design do not matter if your product is not good enough. This resonates with pretty much all successful start ups. You need to obsess over the quality of your product, always listening and making it better.

Solve a need

Giving people what they want or solving a need will make it much easier to sell your product. Sounds obvious but I know a lot of people (myself included) who have built products do not have a market that can sustain growth.

Honest and listening to your customer

Use any opportunity to listen to your customers. When Innocent started they had a phone line for people to ring up and chat about the product. They used to write on their bottles, “if you are bored call us for a chat”. They also invited people to drop into fruit towers if they were in the area. The routes to communicate have increased over the last few years and Innocent take advantage of their blog, Facebook, Twitter and email newsletters, to constantly keep in contact with their customers.

As a result of all of the communication when someone attacks the brand (such as when Innocent sold a stake in the company to Coke), the community around the brand will fight Innocent’s corner and often win customers back to Innocent.

Grandma test

This is another obvious one but something that is often overlooked. If you cannot explain your business or product idea to your grandma in a sentence or two then  you need to re-think. In my opinion this is only for business to consumer businesses, there are a lot of business to business solutions that are very complicated to explain but ultimately very successful.

Michael Birch said that it should be a land grab when you start a business. Do not worry about monetising as you cannot monetise no traffic. Personally this is not something that I agree with, I think that the business model should come first otherwise you are doomed to fail. There are exceptions to this rule (Google, Twitter), but for me the old strategy of build a site, get lots of traffic and then sell the business for millions is not the best return for your effort.

The first things I look at when analysing a business are:

• what is their business model?
• does it make sense?
• is it sustainable?
• how can it be optimised and maximised?

If you are looking to invest in businesses it is much more attractive if the business makes money along the way; rather than simply making a return from a successful exit. Getting lot of users and then selling the business is not a business model.

I can see why people don’t bother with a business model, it has proven quite hard to monetise the web outside of advertising. But is the most essential piece of the puzzle as most of us are not lucky enough to sell our business so it needs to be operationally profitable and cash flow positive.